Entertainment

Her Next Project Could Be Her Comeback

by Kadeen Griffiths

At this stage in my life, all people really need to do in order to get me to sit down and watch a movie is to slap the words "female-centric" on it. Maybe one day we'll live in a world where it stops being noticeable or attention-worthy to have a primarily female cast, but today is not that day. The producers of the Bachelorette are developing The Outskirts, a high school comedy that is now starring Victoria Justice alongside Awkward's Ashley Rickards and The Bling Ring's Katie Chang, and that's exciting news for more than just a female-friendly reason.

While Victoria Justice starred in Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List , The Outskirts will be the second movie she's done since the end of her Nickelodeon show Victorious in 2013. Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List has yet to be released and is more of a mature role than Justice is used to, but The Outskirts sounds like the kind of lighthearted fare that she's proven to do so well in. It follows best friends Jodie (played by Justice) and Mindy (played by The Middle's Eden Sher) who become the victim of a humiliating prank that drives them to gather the other outcasts in the school and launch a social revolution. Jogia, Rickards, and Chang play a slacker, a gossipy overachiever, and a girl scout respectively, all of whom help with the rebellion.

It's described as Mean Girls meets Revenge of the Nerds, two films that now seem like they were always meant to skip hand in hand across a grassy field together. Chang will be starring in her third movie since The Bling Ring, for which she was critically acclaimed, and Rickards rounds out the cast with her comedic background in Awkward and her dramatic background in One Tree Hill. Justice's film career may be lackluster so far, with Victorious being her only real claim to fame, but she'll be reunited with fellow Victorious alum Avan Jogia with whom she has a years-long friendship that gives them amazing on-screen chemistry.

The film will also have an anti-bullying message that might not be immediately clear just from reading the premise. Accoding to Claude Dal Farra, one of the producers, "[The Outskirts] also deals with an issue like high school bullying. Rarely do we find scripts that can deliver such an important message while appealing to wide audiences."

Mean Girls ended with Cady's realization that acting like a titular mean girl wasn't going to make her any more successful than the girl she was directing that ire at and Revenge of the Nerds ends with a similar speech about how it feels to be mistreated just for being different, so combining both of those messages into a single film at a time when the bullying problem is at an all-time high is just what the world needs. It's been 10 years since Mean Girls came out and twenty years since Revenge of the Nerds and those issues are still as relevant today as they ever were then.

Between the awesome cast, the awesome premise, and the awesome message, the only real question I have left is when can I buy my ticket?

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