The Everybody Wants Some!! Re-evaluation Is Not Happening Fast Enough

Declare this film a classic, now

Certain movies are meant to be watched at specific times of the year.  It would feel weird to watch Home Alone anywhere outside of the Thanksgiving to Christmas window.  The Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter franchises also fall on this timeline.  Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, a movie about the last day of school in 1976, is best watched at the beginning of the summer.  

And it’s around this time of the year, mid to late August, that I prefer to watch another Linklater film, Everybody Wants Some!!  Named after the second track from Van Halen’s 1980 album Women and Children First, this movie follows a house full of college baseball players as they enjoy their last free weekend before class starts on Monday.  It’s been described as something of a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused.  The characters and setting are completely different, but the vibe is exactly the same.  It’s about a bunch of people just hanging out during an important period on the school calendar.  

But the connections don’t stop there.  These two films have plenty of thematic links.  Both are named after popular rock songs from the era.  Dazed is set in high school in 1976, EWS!! is set in college in 1980.  In EWS!!, the main character Jake, a freshman pitcher on the baseball team, is the exact same age that Mitch (also a pitcher) from Dazed would be during his freshman year of college.  It’s like we’re picking up with Mitch’s story after he graduated high school.   Sure, they’re not the same character, but they’re linked by time and vocation.  Dazed ends with a shot of the main characters driving on an open road, heading into Houston to buy Aerosmith tickets (“Top priority of the summer”).  EWS!! opens with a shot of Jake on an open road, driving away from his home town and towards his new life in college.

With Dazed and Confused being such a beloved film, and Everybody Wants Some!! being so closely linked to it, you’d think EWS!! would be considered a classic as well, or at least brought up with a high level of frequency, right?  Well, that’s not the case.  Not only have most people I know never seen Everybody Wants Some!!, they don’t even know it exists.  That needs to change.

Well, you might be thinking, maybe this movie just isn’t that good.  Just because it’s linked to Dazed and Confused doesn’t automatically mean it’s of the same caliber.  Don’t most sequels, even “spiritual” ones, suck anyway?  That’s a fair guess, but it’s wrong.  Of the few people I know who have seen Everybody Wants Some!!, they all absolutely love it.

At work, we have an external facing Slack channel with one of our clients.  One day, the conversation briefly turned to movies after someone brought up Linklater’s most recent effort, Hit Man.  It stars Glen Powell, who also stars in EWS!!.  I made an offhand comment about how maybe the success of Hit Man would trigger a re-evaluation of EWS!!, and a member of their team who hadn’t been active on the Slack channel in weeks comes flying off the top rope with a “Dude, I LOVE Everybody Wants Some!!”  The second it was brought up, he couldn’t contain his exuberance.  It reminded me of the first time I saw EWS!! in theaters.  When the movie ended and everyone stood up to leave, I saw a woman turn to her boyfriend and say “I LOVED that!” with a level of excitement you don’t hear people discuss movies with anymore.  This is a film that is basically just two hours of guys being dudes, and she was enthralled.

So what is it that makes Everybody Wants Some!! so great?  What I love about this movie is what I love about all of Linklater’s top-tier works.  On the surface, it seems extremely slight and casual, but upon closer inspection, there’s deep philosophical stuff happening everywhere.  It’s a great reminder that all of life’s little moments are imbued with importance and significance, but only if you stop and take a moment to look at them.

While Dazed and Confused was about being in high school and trying to establish some type of freedom and control over your own life, Everybody Wants Some!! is about what happens when you finally do get that freedom.  When you get to college, you don’t have authority figures constantly watching over you any more.  You have to be your own authority figure and take responsibility for crafting your own life.  It’s a bit of a monkey’s paw situation.  You finally got what you were looking for in your youth, but it turns out to actually be work.  But that’s where the joy is.  The joy isn’t in just doing whatever you want without getting scolded for it.  The joy is in dedicating yourself to a path and accepting the challenges and responsibilities that come with it.  And by accepting those challenges and taking that difficult path, you are granted the meaningful reward of self-actualization.  You become who you truly are, but only through work and effort, not by just showing up.  This movie does a fantastic job of showing that the most important things in life are earned, not given.

As Jake, the freshman pitcher, moves through his first college weekend, he’s absorbing advice and points of view about identity from everyone around him.  This includes the other players on the baseball team as well as Beverly, the freshman theater major he meets and sparks a romance with.  Jake and Beverly have several long conversations in this movie about their respective passions (He with baseball, she with theater) and find common ground over the fact that they both have something bigger than themselves that they’ve dedicated their college experience to.  My favorite part of the movie comes at the end, where Jake and Beverly are floating on a lazy river just a few hours before class starts, talking about how important it is to simply try.  

“It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” Beverly asks.

“What?” Jake replies.

“That we get to feel passion in this world, about anything, you know?”

There’s another great scene (Which, unfortunately, I could not find a clip of) where Jake is shooting pool with senior pitcher Willoughby, played by Wyatt Russell.  Both are commiserating over what they perceive to be an “anti-pitcher bias” on the team.  Willoughby tells him to not view it as a negative and to instead embrace his outsider status.

“We’re fucking weird man, we’re different.  And the trick is, you can’t fight it.  You have to accept it.  When you do that, you bring who you are, never who they want.  And that, my friend, is when it gets fun.”

What an unbelievable piece of advice for a freshman to hear during his first weekend in college.  Hell, I think it’s an unbelievable piece of advice for anyone to hear, at any time in their life.  And this movie is full of scenes like that.

I mentioned Glen Powell earlier, and he absolutely shines in this movie as Finn, the coolest and most likable senior on the team.  Everyone is talking about Powell now after his recent run of hits, but Everybody Wants Some!! fans knew this guy had the juice back in 2016 when the movie first came out.  

He’s a non-stop fountain of advice and wisdom for Jake.  When Jake is first going out to meet up with Beverly and admits that he’s nervous, Finn tells him, “Pressure is a choice.  You have to approach it like you’re on the mound or taking an at bat.  Put everything else out of your mind and just let natural ability take over.  Assuming you have natural ability.”  That’s the jock experience in a nutshell, providing encouragement while not being able to resist getting in a light-hearted dig at your teammate.

Another reason I love this movie so much is that it speaks to a very particular part of my college experience.  I “played” football in college (“Played” being in quotes because I never actually got in a game), and this movie absolutely nails the college athlete hangout vibe.  There’s constant dick measuring and status checking, but there’s also an underlying aura of encouragement and camaraderie that runs deeper than whatever teasing that happens to go on.  And in any case, the teasing is done to toughen you up so that you’re able to perform on the field come game time.  

Do you think a typical, artsy, film major could have captured something so honest about the team sports experience?  Of course not.  They haven’t lived it, so whatever they put down would be a caricature instead of the real thing.  Only someone like Linklater, who actually played baseball in college, could have made a movie like this.

All of this praise ultimately begs the question, why isn’t Everybody Wants Some!! more well known?  I can’t say for sure, but I can venture some guesses.  It was released in the spring of 2016, a time when comedies had already begun to fade from the mainstream movie market.  It was also the first movie Linklater did after he was nominated for an Oscar for Boyhood.  You’d think that would help this movie’s chances, but the type of people who go see Oscar nominated films aren’t interested in watching college baseball players hang out with each other for two hours.  I respect the move though.  Following up the most critically acclaimed movie of your career with something so niche is a thing only Linklater would or could do.  Whatever the reason, Everybody Wants Some!! didn’t get a wide release and it didn’t make much money when it initially came out.

It also hasn’t found a permanent home on premium cable or streaming, where a lot of movies like this get a second life.  In all of my time scrolling through the guide on my cable box looking for movies to watch on HBO, Showtime or any of the other premium channels, I’ve never seen Everybody Wants Some!! pop up on the screen.  Where I have seen it is buried deep in the catalog of multiple streaming services.  For a while it was on Hulu, then it migrated over to Netflix, then it dropped off the streamers entirely, and now it’s on Prime, for who knows how long.  If a movie like this is going to gain any traction, you have to know where to find it.  Suits wouldn’t have had its major comeback if you had to open a different app every time you wanted to watch it.

And yet, there are hints of appreciation for this movie floating around online.  I’ve seen Lights, Camera, Barstool repeatedly championing it on Twitter.  EWS!! feels like a movie that would be a hit with the wider Zynternet, so that’s a good start.  And every now and then, like my Slack channel experience, I’ll hear people discuss Everybody Wants Some!! with the fondness it deserves.  Plus, I’m always willing to throw my own recommendation out there to people I think would enjoy the film.

That’s pretty much the whole reason I wrote this essay.  There’s a great movie out there that a lot of people don’t know about, and I think that should change.  So, as August draws to a close, football season creeps up on us, and college campuses around the country begin to open up for the fall semester, why not head over to Prime Video and watch a movie that’s a perfect fit for this time of the year?  I’m sure you won’t regret it.