Easy A

Screenwriter Bert V. Royal claims to have written the entire screenplay, except for the last ten pages, in five days.[5] Royal's plan was to adapt three classic works into films and to set them at the same high school, so that some characters would appear in multiple films. Besides The Scarlet Letter, which was the source material for Easy A, Royal wanted to adapt Cyrano de Bergerac and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.[5] Natasha Bedingfield's song "Pocketful of Sunshine", which becomes a running joke in the film, was not in Royal's original script. He envisioned "Olive", a track from Ken Nordine's 1966 album Colors, to play during Olive's weekend montage (which introduces the song).[5] Director Will Gluck's favorite film is Ferris Bueller's Day Off and has multiple homages to it in the film (Olive's shower Mohawk, "never had one lesson"), among many other John Hughes references.[6] According to Royal, although the word "fuck" appeared 47 times in the original draft, which was written as an R-rated comedy, all occurrences were cut from the final film. However, Gluck shot two versions of many scenes, both with and without the coarser language.[5] Although the film was cut down for a wider audience, the film still obtained a 15 rating in the United Kingdom.[7]

Gluck credits Stone with improvising the line about being a "Gossip Girl in the Sweet Valley of Traveling Pants".[8] The entire film was shot in Ojai, California in the summer of 2009, using Panavision's Genesis and later filmized. Not a single film set was used; even the houses in the film belong to Ojai residents. The school used as "Ojai North High School" in the film is Nordhoff High School, and the end credits are filmed on Fordyce Road, both located in Ojai, California.

Easy A was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on December 21, 2010.[11] The DVD features a gag reel, Emma Stone's audition footage, an audio commentary with director Gluck and Stone, and previews. Blu-ray exclusive bonus features include: The Making of Easy A, The School of Pop Culture: Movies of the '80s, Vocabulary of Hilarity and a trivia track.

The film opened on September 17, 2010, and grossed $6,787,163 on its opening day and $17,734,040 in its opening weekend, placing second behind The Town on both figures, and already making back more than double the film's slim $8 million budget. This was in line with expectations from Sony of an opening weekend take of around $15 million.[2] The film grossed a total of $58,401,464 in the United States and Canada plus $16,624,752 in international markets for a worldwide total of $75,026,216, earning its budget back more than nine times, making it a huge financial success.[3]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 85% based on 193 reviews, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "It owes a huge debt to older (and better) teen comedies, but Easy A proves a smart, witty showcase for its irresistibly charming star, Emma Stone."[12] Another review aggregator, Metacritic, assigned the film a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[13] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.[14]

Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half out of four stars, writing, "Easy A offers an intriguing middle ground to the absolute of sexual abstinence: Don't sleep with anybody, but say you did. It's a funny, engaging comedy that takes the familiar but underrated Emma Stone and makes her, I believe, a star."[15] Richard Corliss of Time magazine named Emma Stone's performance one of the ten best film performances of 2010, writing that "Stone lends winning maturity and a gift for making sassy dialogue sound natural. This 22-year-old is an actress-personality — a star — around whom Hollywood could build some pretty good movies".[16] John Griffiths from Us Weekly gave the film two and a half stars out of four; he praised Stone, stating that "With her husky voice and fiery hair, Stone is spectacular, echoing early Lindsay Lohan", but also added that "The story is thin, and the laughs meager".[17]

The film has been praised for redefining tropes of teen films, particularly those of the sex comedy genre.[18] In a retrospective piece for The Washington Post, Anying Guo discussed the film's influence, pointing out the film "[subverted] sex-crazed tropes into a sharp, thoughtful film" by satirizing teens' obsession with virginity itself.[19] Guo added, "Packed with references to “Say Anything” and other ’80s homages, the film felt refreshing against the steady churn of bildungsroman narratives that often centered on young men".[19]