10 years of Wild Child - challenging the American monopoly on the teenage experience
15th August 2018
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Ten years ago today, Wild Child hit our screens and became a fast favourite amongst British teens. However in the ten years since the films' release, there has been a relative scarcity of British teen movies produced. American teen movies are in abundance, with recent release The Darkest Minds being a one in a slew of American teen book adaptations, but for whatever reason, British teen movies have not had the same traction.
In fact, I can only really think of three big teen movies produced in and starring British characters: Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, Wild Child and St Trinians, all of which were released at around the same time, 2007/2008. In the ten/eleven years since then, the number of movies about British teens have been few and far between, and it's not for a lack of an audience.
The box office success of films like The Inbetweeners (which had the most succesful opening weekend of any comedy film in the UK at the time of its release, with the sequel then surpassing that record) and St Trinians which was one of the top grossing films of the decade, shows that these films can gain an audience. So why then the lack of British teen films?
The American teen experience has become ubiquitous with the teen experience, and because the American film market is so much larger than the British one, it seems natural that when it comes to teen movies, American teen movies are far more dominant than British ones.

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