Blake Lively Started Out In An Underrated Comedy That’s Being Rediscovered On Streaming
Blake Lively stars in Accepted, a comedy form 2006 that's found a second-life streaming on Netflix.
Before Blake Lively broke into superstardom with the TV series Gossip Girl, she starred in the underrated 2006 comedy Accepted. Now, the forgotten comedy is getting a bit of a boost on Netflix, with FlixPatrol saying it is currently #6 in this week’s Top Ten. If you missed this raunchy college comedy when it first came out, you can check it out now on the streamer.
Accepted follows perennial slacker Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long), who joins with a group of other high school graduates to create a fake college after they’re rejected from all the colleges they applied for. Blake Lively plays Bartleby’s love interest, Monica Moreland. The film sees the fake college going up against the dean of Harmon College (Anthony Heald), who tries to get them off the property to build a prestigious park-like walkway similar to Harvard and Yale’s.
Blake Lively isn’t the only familiar face who has an early role in her career in Accepted. Jonah Hill also stars in one of his earliest roles as Bartleby’s best friend, just a year before Superbad would put him on the map. The rest of the cast is rounded out by Lewis Black, Colombus Short, Maria Thayer, Jim O’Heir, Mark Derwin, Jeremey Howard, and Travis Van Winkle. It was also the directorial debut of High Fidelity co-writer Steve Pink, who would go on to direct Hot Tub Time Machine.
Accepted wasn’t necessarily a comedic revelation, but it’s a solid college comedy, and it’s fun to see early performances from now megastars like Blake Lively and Jonah Hill. If you’re a fan of 2000s-era comedies, there are certainly worse options than this. Of course, it doesn’t quite live up to classics like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which it was competing with at the time in theaters, but it’s still an enjoyable enough watch to check out.
Since having a smaller role in films like Accepted, Blakey Lively has gone on to do much bigger things. While it’s unlikely Accepted played a big part in launching her career, she would begin her six-season starring role in Gossip Girl the following year. This is the role that would make Lively a household name, and it would also help to launch the careers of actors like Leighton Meester and Penn Badgley.
During her stint on Gossip Girl, Blake Lively nabbed roles in critically acclaimed films like The Town and Oliver Stone’s Savages and less critically acclaimed films like Green Lantern. Of course, Green Lantern wasn’t a total wash for Lively, as it’s where she met her now-husband Ryan Reynolds, whom she married a year later. Green Lantern is still definitely terrible, but it did give Hollywood one of its most prominent power couples.
Since starring in Green Lantern, Blake Lively has received critical acclaim for her roles in 2015’s The Age of Adaline and 2020’s The Rhythm Section. In 2018, she had a solid box office hit starring opposite Anna Kendrick in the crime thriller A Simple Favor. After The Rhythm Section, Lively kept things relatively low-key, but she does have some interesting projects coming up.
Most recently, it was announced that Blake Lively was set to star in the upcoming adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s romance novel It Ends with Us. The film follows the tumultuous relationship between Lively’s character and a young neurosurgeon based on the real relationship of Hoover’s parents. Justin Baldoni stars opposite Lively and also directs and co-wrote the adaptation.
However, It Ends with Us is temporarily on production hiatus until the WGA strike is resolved. Reportedly, the movie was about halfway through filming. Along with Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, the film will also star Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, and Hasan Minhaj.
For now, it seems like we won’t get a solid release date for It Ends with Us for a while. Blake Lively also has other projects on the docket, but none of them have official release dates, so we may have to wait a bit until we can see a new project from Lively. So, now is as good of a time as any to head over to Netflix and check out one of her earliest roles in Accepted while we keep you updated on her upcoming projects.
