Amanda Seyfried says bad marketing ‘cheapened’ Jennifer’s Body: ‘I think they ruined it’

Amanda Seyfried has nothing but good things to say about Jennifer's Body — unless you're talking about how the film was advertised to audiences.

Looking back on the black-hearted horror comedy in a recent GQ video breaking down her past screen roles, the actress said, "I can't critique this movie, it's to me a perfect movie."

But not everything about the movie was perfect. "If the critics criticize anything, it would be the marketing," Seyfried said. "The marketing sucked. It just did, and we all agree."

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Written by Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama, Jennifer's Body centers on the friendship between beautiful and desired high school student Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) and reserved dweeb Anita "Needy" Lesnicki (Seyfried). When a secretly Satanic band rolls through town and attempts to sacrifice Jennifer, she survives and is endowed with demonic strength and a lust for blood.

The film combines elements of screwball, vampiric horror, and teen sex comedy into a complex and powerful satire of the ways young women are treated — both on and off screen. But when the film hit theaters in 2009, the marketing campaign focused squarely on rising star Fox's sex appeal.

"The marketing team cheapened it, like it was just, you know, a romp," Seyfried said. "A gory romp. I think they ruined it."

At the time of its release, Jennifer's Body received mixed reviews from critics and underperformed at the box office, grossing $31.5 million at the worldwide box office on a $16 million budget. But it has since developed a reputation as an underappreciated cult classic.

Seyfried still has ample praise for her director and screenwriter. "Karyn is a fierce advocate of women in storytelling," she told GQ. "She is able to enhance the relationships between women on film and TV. She's able to mine everything she can, and she's very, very human, and she's very sensitive."

She also called Cody "outspoken and beautiful and smart and funny," adding, "We were expressing a certain angst in a very, very specific comedic way, in a very specific genre."

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Seyfried isn't the first Jennifer's Body alum to critique the way the movie was promoted. Her costar Adam Brody remarked in 2023 that the marketing "couldn't have missed the mark harder."

"The film was a marketing person's dream, and then to see them do that," he said, referencing Fox's skimpy outfit in the main poster. "Part Goosebumps, part Maxim. It's not even anything she wears in the movie." Brody added, "The film was directed by a woman, starring two women, written by that year's screenwriting Oscar winner, and instead they're like, 'Let's bury all of that. Don't tell anyone that. This is for people who like Transformers.'"

Cody said in 2018, "Because of the way the film was marketed, people wanted to see the movie as a cheap, trashy, exploitative vehicle for the hot girl from Transformers." And Fox said on Eli Roth's History of Horror podcast in 2020 that she felt the film was "panned for reasons that had nothing to do with" its contents, like "my image at the time and who I was in the media at the time and the backlash to that. The movie never really stood a chance."

It sounds like Seyfried is still hoping to have the last laugh. "You know, I'm looking forward to the sequel," she said. "They're working on it. I already said thumbs-up. I was like, 'Whenever you're ready, I'm ready.'"