Trivia / I Love You, Beth Cooper

• Billing Displacement: While Hayden Panettiere is top-billed, has her character's name in the title and is essentially playing the film's catalyst, the story is told entirely from the points of view of Denis and Rich. (Even the title comes from Denis.)
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $18 million. Box office, $16.4 million. Even the low budget couldn't save a release in the middle of a particularly competitive summer. Director Chris Columbus had more luck the following year with Percy Jackson, but leading actor Paul Rust, not so much.
• California Doubling: The movie takes place in Washington, but was filmed almost entirely in Vancouver, Canada.
• Creator Backlash: While writer Larry Doyle has stopped short of outright disowning the film, he did publicly complain about the changes that the studio executives forced him to make, and that the cuts to the ending caused the subplot with Kevin and his buddies to just fizzle out with no real resolution.
• Dawson Casting: Averted with Panettiere, played very straight with everyone else. The high school pictures of the cast and above-the-line crew in the end credits give the game away (Panettiere looks around the same age in the movie as in her picture, but the others... not so much).
• Dyeing for Your Art: Chris Columbus asked actress Lauren Storm to gain weight to play Beth's cheerleader friend Treece.
• Executive Meddling: The novel was written as a dark satire of common tropes of teen movies made in the late 1990s and early-mid 2000s. However, the studio forced writer Larry Doyle to retool it into a much more standard-issue teen movie along the lines of Superbad.
• Self-Adaptation: Larry Doyle wrote both the script and the original book.
• Star-Derailing Role: While Panettiere's career survived the film's critical and commercial failure (it may have helped that she's never played a cheerleader since - before you ask, Claire had moved on by that point in the show), Paul Rust wasn't so fortunate; he hasn't appeared in a movie since, and his career didn't really take off again until he took up writing in addition to acting.
• What Could Have Been: Larry Doyle originally came up with the story idea as a screenplay, but after being unable to sell it he turned the idea into a novel, which ironically proved such a hit that he was able to get a screen adaptation produced. One unfortunate side-effect of this was that he was able to make the novel edgier than his original screenplay was, due to not having to worry about Executive Meddling so much, only for it to kick in again when the studio demanded that the film be PG-13, causing it to come across like a neutered version of the novel.