22 years after first appearing as mother and daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan return for the highly anticipated sequel to Disney’s 2003 smash hit Freaky Friday in the aptly titled Freakier Friday.
Joined by original cast members Mark Harmon and Chad Michael Murray, and joined by new faces Manny Jacinto, Sophia Hammons, and Julia Butters, Freakier Friday is directed by Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note) from a script written by Jordan Weiss (Dollface, Sweethearts).
Anna (Lindsay Lohan) and Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) Coleman have come a long way since the events of Freaky Friday. Now a single mother and music producer, Anna is doing her best to manage her precocious teenage daughter Harper (Julia Butters) with the help of a somewhat overbearing Tess. When Harper and her classmate, the snobby British immigrant Lily Reyes (Sophia Hammons), get into an incident at school, Anna’s life is spun around by Lily’s handsome widow father Eric (Manny Jacinto).
Eric and Anna rapidly fall in love, and within 6 months the pair are engaged and planning their wedding. Harper and Lily, bitter and resentful at being forced further into each other’s lives, are constantly at each other’s throats, with Harper worried that the marriage and Lily’s desire to attend a fashion school back home in London will tear her away from her friends and family. At Anna’s bachelorette party, Harper and Lily are read a vague and ominous fortune from a back-parlour psychic, leading to all four Coleman-Reyes women swapping bodies overnight.
Initially frustrated that they’re experiencing another body-swap, Anna and Tess quickly embrace being teenagers again; with fast metabolisms and resilient joints, the Coleman women run wild on e-scooters and gorge themselves on junk food. Harper and Lily on the other hand, distressed that they’re now “old”, realise that they’re in a unique position to end their parents’ engagement for good and go back to their normal lives.
I, like many millennial-aged people, grew up with Disney’s 2003 version of Freaky Friday. The combination of Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan at her peak, not to mention the unbelievably attractive Chad Michael Murray, resulted in one of the most iconic Disney live action films of all time. Mix in some truly unforgettable music and you’ve got a verifiable masterpiece. So of course, I was both excited and nervous about the announcement that a sequel was in the works. With such a straightforward concept and a neat conclusion to the first film, it begged the question of what else they could do to make the story feel fresh.
The choice to add in two more teens and do a four-way body swap at first thought seemed ambitious, but to her full credit, Weiss wrote a great story that allowed for both new and old characters to work in balance. When I saw the first trailer for Freakier Friday I was concerned that the majority of the screentime would be given to the new kids, but thankfully both Lohan, Lee Curtis, and Murray had ample time to play; seeing Chad Michael Murray flirt with Jamie Lee Curtis on screen again was truly so deliciously funny that it almost brought me to tears. Lohan, experiencing a proper career renaissance, was so delightful as an adult Anna and teenage Harper that despite the long gap between films, it’s clear that Anna Coleman is a character that Lohan cherished, and she so easily slipped back into those shoes.
Of the newcomers, Hammon and Butters had a lot of spunk though it does feel like Hammon got the rawer end of the deal. A native American, Hammon’s British accent was extremely hammy, although to be fair, it was better than Jacinto’s and on par for a Disney film. If you can ignore how gratingly bad their accents are, both Jacinto and Hammon are very enjoyable to watch (bonus points go to Jacinto for an exceptional dance performance), giving the plot a new emotional pull as their characters navigate through their own kind of grief, displacement, and insecurities.
Bearing in mind that Freakier Friday is a family film and is bound to be crammed with corny gags and the occasionally stiff dialogue, this sequel still has a lot to enjoy for older viewers. For the nostalgia alone, Freakier Friday ticked plenty of my boxes and had me feeling like a pre-teen again as I giggled my way through to the credits. Maybe Freakier Friday won’t make it into your favourite films of 2025 list, but it will transport you to a simpler time when movies were just for fun.
Freakier Friday is in cinemas now.