| Sara Waisglass, of Ginny & Georgia fame, does her best to elevate How to Lose a Popularity Contest above a typical teen romance. It’s cute, sweet, predictable, and very run-of-the-mill. A good girl falls for a bad boy, and other than a decent message about seeing the best in people and not judging others before you get to know them, it’s a hastily written, well-produced average teen romance. | | 2026
Directed by: Stephen S. Campanelli
Screenplay by: Dorian Keyes, Kaitlin Reilly
Starring: Sara Waisglass, Chase Hudson
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Ellie (Sara Waisglass) is the good girl – a geek with a small group of friends who spends most of her time obsessing over her future and how to get perfect grades and get into the perfect school, and then rest of her time complaining about the popular boys. Nate (Chase Hudson) is the bad boy – a popular dumb boy, who constantly puts others down, and then gets in trouble, and then has everyone gushing over him, and then he repeats that pattern. The screenplay has a hard time balancing him treating others poorly and then have them all fawning over him.
Mostly the film knows that good girl falls for bad boy is a winning formula so it does nothing more with it. And I mean nothing more, there is no romance obstacle other than Ellie thinks Nate is a popular asshole. There is no money issues, no distance issues, nothing to help elevate the drama. Which means it’s a pretty staid and boring rom-com. The script adds some punchiness to the dialogue, but when most of the actors aren’t very good and the writers are a generation older, it doesn’t end up helping.
When Ellie and Nate find themselves recently dumped and bonding over eating their feelings with pizza, Ellie hatches a plan, she calls it a convoluted plan, but really it’s just a stupid plan – but hey, what do you expect from a book smart, socially-dumb teenage girl in a teen movie? Ellie convinces Nate to run for school president, which will make his ex see him as more than a good-for-nothing dumb jock, and when he wins, which of course he will, he’s popular, it’s a popularity contest and Ellie is his campaign manager, she’ll use his past to get him removed as president, thereby electing her ex in his place, apparently making him see how amazing she is. It's a bad plan, and if it was a better written movie, then Nate and Ellie falling for each other would not be the only obstacle.
Overall, the acting is not great apart from Sara Waisglass, but Ellie does have a lot of Maxine Baker-isms so there is not much range for her here. As with most Tubi originals, it’s well produced, and even with a subpar script, How to Lose a Popularity Contest is very cute, sweet and an easy watch.
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