Stewart, Shawkat's 'The Wrong Girls' Premieres Friday In Theaters
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- The Wrong Girls premieres Friday in theaters, a stoner comedy written and directed by Dylan Meyer starring Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as codependent best friends who discover a mysterious drug granting telepathic powers while scrambling to pay rent in 24 hours.
- Meyer said the film almost shot in Vancouver, New Orleans, or New Jersey before qualifying for the California Film & TV Tax Credit, calling L.A.'s weed culture and 'towny' identity essential to the movie's 'L.A. accent' and arguing the characters 'wouldn't survive in New York.'
- Stewart framed shooting in her hometown as urgent because friends and family in the L.A. film community are 'hurting,' noting her brother 'should be making movies' but is working construction instead.
- Meyer conceived the film 14 years ago and pitched it as filling a gap in the stoner-comedy canon, saying female friendship 'is worthy of a whole movie in the same way that men and their friends getting into stupid shit is worthy of a whole canon of movies' alongside franchises like Cheech & Chong and Jay & Silent Bob.
- The ensemble cast includes LaKeith Stanfield, Kate McKinnon, Geena Davis, Tony Hale, Seth Rogen, and Kumail Nanjiani, which Stewart called 'really validating' for a female-led take on a male-dominated genre.
- Meyer floated a sequel and a cut post-credit scene with Davis and McKinnon's characters experimenting on the leads in a lab, saying 'there's so much left there' while acknowledging 'it's hard to compete with the first one of anything.'
Why it matters: Stewart's remarks that L.A. film workers are 'hurting' — her grip brother now in construction — turn the California tax credit decision into a quiet statement about local industry erosion, while Meyer's explicit positioning of the film against male stoner buddy canon stakes a rare female-led franchise claim with sequel material already mapped out.
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