Any project that finds itself stuck in development hell for decades stands a 50/50 chance of being awful, but Judy Blume never even considered allowing her seminal novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. to fall into cinematic purgatory.
Hollywood had been making overtures at the author for almost half a century to try and bring the book to the big screen, but it wasn’t until 2020 – a full 50 years after its publication – that Blume finally relented and sold the rights to Lionsgate for Kelly Fremon Craig to write and direct.
That’s an awful lot of pressure on somebody’s shoulders, but looking at a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score of 99 percent from 185 reviews and an audience approval rating of 95 percent, it would be fair to say that Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. lived up to the hype and then some.
Since being made available on-demand, the film has been capturing imaginations all over the streaming circuit too, with FlixPatrol naming the moving drama as one of the Top 10 most-watched features in the United States on Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play, even if it did initially bomb at the box office after failing to recoup its modest $30 million budget from theaters.
The coming-of-age classic finds the title hero moving to a new town and beginning to muse on the existentialism of life, friendship, family, adolescence, and everything in between. On the surface, it was never the sort of thing to tear it up on the big screen, but the overwhelmingly positive responses have at the very least indicated the long-awaited and almost universally-acclaimed adaptation was worth the time it took to finally make the jump from the printed page to the silver screen.