So Long, "Superbad": Are You Ready for "Booksmart" and "Good Boys"?

For "social piranhas" everywhere.

Lately, we’ve been spoilt for choice when it comes to honest, hilarious movies and TV shows about the horrifying trials of puberty. We’re thinking Eighth Grade, Lady Bird, Blockers, Pen15 and Big Mouth.

However, two new films debuted at the SXSW festival in Austin this week, and they’re coming to take the crown from still-reigning title-holder Superbad.

Booksmart and Good Boys both feature a bunch of students going feral over the course of one wild night. Both seem to be directly inspired by Superbad (both having literal ties to that classic 2007 comedy). And both even feature the same DJ Shadow song, "Nobody Speak", in their teasers.

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to choose between them! Get ready to fall in love with both based on their trailers alone. (Just get ready for plenty of coarse language and sexual references. These trailers ain’t Red Band for nothing.)

The first is Booksmart, the directorial debut of Olivia Wilde, which stars Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein (from Lady Bird, and sister of Superbad’s Jonah Hill). In it, two high-achieving high schoolers attempt to cut loose on the night before graduation. The raunchy trailer demonstrates just how hardcore the night gets for the duo.

The reviews out of SXSW have been nothing short of ecstatic.

Uhhhh holy shit BOOKSMART is a masterpiece? #SXSW

— Emily Yoshida (@emilyyoshida) March 11, 2019

#Booksmart is a coming of age, like...masterpiece? @BeanieFeldstein is a goddamn STAR. This movie just added years to my life.

— Kevin Fallon (@kpfallon) March 11, 2019

But wait, there’s more.

Seth Rogen—who famously co-wrote Superbad when he was just a teenager—has produced Good Boys, directed by Gene Stupnitsky and written by Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg. It similarly follows the Superbad model. This time, however, the trio of good-boys-gone-bad are in fifth grade, rather than their final year of high school.

They’re also seemingly getting into way worse trouble than Hill, Michael Cera and Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse ever did in Rogen's original flick. As Seth even says to the three main Good Boys—Jacob Tremblay, Keith L. Williams and Brady Moon—in the below clip, they’re technically not even old enough to watch the Red Band trailer for their filthy film. Irony!

Though Superbad was a trail-blazing comedy about friendship and platonic male love, Rogen recently admitted that there’s a whole lot in the film that wouldn’t fly today, and shouldn’t. We saw him course-correct with the woke and inclusive Bad Neighbours 2 (again, starring Beanie Feldstein), so it’ll be interesting to see how Good Boys has learnt from those lessons too.

Good Boys debuts in Australian cinemas 15 August. Booksmart arrives in the US this May. We’ll update this article once we find out the Australian release date.

Header Image: Universal Pictures / Annapurna Pictures