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For decades, back-to-school movies were for other old people. You had the Rodney Dangerfield comedy from 1986, Billy Madison in 1995, Never Been Kissed in 1999, and 21 Jump Street in 2012. Millennials could certainly enjoy these flicks, because it’s always funny to see out-of-touch old people get their comeuppance from young, hip people who know better. These movies let the audience laugh at prior generations, and millennials laughed along.
But time only moves in one direction, and now millennials’ moment has come. The first trailer for the Hulu comedy Never Change! features 30-somethings getting hit in the face by a ball during gym, being reprimanded by teachers for misbehaving in their desks, and wearing ugly suits during prom. And they look so incredibly old while doing it.
Directed by Marty Schousboe and written by John Reynolds, Never Change! stars Reynolds, Sofia Black-D’Elia, Carmen Christopher, and more as the 2008 graduating class of North Meadows High School, who saw their senior year come to a sudden end when a tornado destroyed the town, and cut their high school experience down by two weeks. Nearly two decades later, they all must return to North Meadows to finish those final weeks, despite the fact that they’re all in their mid-30s.
The trailer promises everything you’d expect to find in a back-to-school movie. The characters will get a chance to reunite with lost loves, take stock of lives that didn’t turn out the way they had hoped, and try to atone for the mistakes of youth.
But Never Change! has a uniquely millennial quality that sets it apart from its forerunners, lacking the triumphalist fantasy of an ’80s back-to-school movie or the ironic distance that you’d find in a ’90s version. The trailer’s standout joke illustrates the difference, in which one of the returning students invites his new/old classmates to a party because his parents will be gone.
His parents aren’t gone on vacation or on a work trip. They’ve died, so when our grown-up party animal enthuses, “We’ll have the house totally to ourselves, and we’re gonna rage,” he does so with gritted teeth and a false smile, holding back tears, while his friends look on in empathetic confusion.
That mix of earnestness and awkwardness could make Never Change! into something more than a genre exercise. And the movie’s cast doesn’t hurt either. In addition to the aforementioned leads, the film boasts appearances from Severance breakout Zach Cherry, Patti Harrison from I Think You Should Leave, Saturday Night Live alum Ana Gasteyer, and Topher Grace in a wig that is more upsetting than anything he did as Venom.
With such a good cast and compelling premise, Never Change! might make the march of time a little easier for those born between 1981 and 1996. And if not, well, the grave waits for us all anyway.
Never Change! streams on Hulu on June 17, 2026.
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