Nisha Ganatra’s film Freakier Friday is the perfect case study in Disney’s endlessly stretchable IP. The idea for it all started with Mary Roger’s 1972 young adult novel Freaky Friday, and the premise of that book was so malleable that the studio has managed to squeeze four films, a TV movie, and even a stage musical out of it, each iteration reflecting a kind of corporate déjà vu. Now, the newest addition to the franchise is a sequel to the 2003 film Freaky Friday starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. Most of the cast, as well as the film’s ethos — essentially, empathy through role-reversal — has stayed the same, but in 2025, the film primarily and palpably functions as millennial fan service that is less successful than its beloved predecessor despite honest efforts from Curtis and Lohan.
22 years after the first mother-daughter body swap, Freakier Friday catches up with Anna Coleman (Lindsay Lohan), who is now a music producer, a single mom, and on the brink of remarriage. Her teenage daughter Harper (Julia Butters) is a surfer girl who hates the idea of a blended family because she will have to leave California, and her soon-to-be British stepsister and wannabe fashion designer Lily (Sophia Hammons) is no help either. Complicating matters is Anna’s mother, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), still somewhat overbearing even if less uptight, and a part of the wedding planning committee. What’s not new or tweaked in the slightest is the formula: Freakier Friday follows the same beats as every other rendition of the franchise, with a curse, characters swapping bodies, and everyone learning a lesson, etc.
Freakier Friday does feature some humorous beats that can be attributed to its specific starpower, despite the film’s overall unoriginality. Curtis has the rare ability to communicate whole arcs in a shrug or a sidelong glance in much the same way as her father, Tony Curtis, and here she plays a teenager in a grandmother’s body, amusingly moving with the restless, slightly self-conscious energy of someone unaccustomed to a middle-aged body. She manages to make scenes funny that should be merely absurd, like when she slithers across the floor of a record store while chatting with Anna’s former flame Jake (Chad Michael Murray). Curtis’ physicality is a continuation of the athleticism she brought to True Lies and the 2003 version of Freaky Friday, but with a looseness, and perhaps silliness, earned over decades onscreen. Even in scenes that risk tipping into mugging, her comedic timing is simply impeccable.
As for the other half of the star duo, Freakier Friday feels like a return to form for Lohan. In Freaky Friday, she balanced bratty teenage rebellion with a flicker of self-awareness that shaded in the film’s body-swap conceit and relative light weight with both humor and poignance, but it was her chemistry with Curtis that was largely responsible for the outsized success. Their verbal sparring was matched by their physical humor, with Lohan’s mannered performance as an adult woman stuck in a teenager’s body working as the perfect foil to Curtis’ slapstick physicality. However, that performance, like her turn as Cady Heron in Mean Girls, is often overshadowed in memory by Lohan’s paparazzi years, when she was reduced to a running punchline and her acting career eclipsed by endless tabloid drama that included mugshots and alleged substance abuse. Despite most people’s knowledge of this recently bygone era, Lohan’s smile is once again infectious. She adds a lightheartedness to the film that doesn’t ever feel forced, and she brings the same self-conscious energy as Curtis to her turn at the teenager-stuck-in-adult role. But importantly, there’s also an underlying sense of pathos to her character that feels understood rather than performative. Seeing Lohan reclaim Anna now invites an extratextual reckoning with her past, and, in doing so, only heightens Lohan’s allure as an actress.
Unfortunately, no one else here matches Curtis’ or Lohan’s energy, the irony of that sentiment being that the Freaky Friday franchise is known for bringing in new talent. Lohan is the most obvious example, but Jodie Foster famously starred in the 1976 version of the film, while ’90s go-to child star Gaby Hoffman played “Annabelle Andrews” in the made-for-tv version from 1995. Neither Butters nor Hammons manage to stand out in the same way or deliver memorable characters as the newest additions here. They’re certainly competent, hitting their marks and nailing the occasional one-liner, but for the most part they’re overcast by everyone else populating the frame, including Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), the fortune teller who works at Starbucks.
In many ways, Freakier Friday is reminiscent of the Mouse House’s glorious TV days of Disney Channel Original Movies. There are sophomoric touches peppering the script — including a food fight, plenty of garish outfits, and even a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off homage — and these references and the project’s unpretentious character could deliver a shot of nostalgia for some millennials, but they are more likely to alienate other generations who didn’t grow up with the same lore and lightweight Disney polish. It’s no secret that the Disney Channel heyday is dead and gone, the content not what it used to be. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have their own intertextuality that almost certainly does not include Curtis or Lohan in any meaningful way, nor does it have much room for Butters and Hammons. Freakier Friday does little to account for this and doesn’t reinvent itself so much as retrace familiar territory, and in this way, considerably hamstrings its potential for broad appeal. At this point, maybe it’s simply time for Disney to invest in something new.
DIRECTOR: Nisha Ganatra; CAST: Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chad Michael Murray, Mark Harmon; DISTRIBUTOR: Walt Disney Pictures; IN THEATERS: August 8; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 51 min.
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