Adam Brody Criticizes Marketing for 'Jennifer's Body' : 'Couldn't Have Missed the Mark Harder'

Adam Brody regrets how his 2009 movie Jennifer's Body was marketed to audiences.

While speaking with The Independent recently about his new show Fleishman Is in Trouble, Brody, 43, said Jennifer's Body — in which he costarred with Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried — became "a punching bag" after it earned poor reviews and failed to generate much attention from audiences at the box office.

"It definitely was derided at the time and that felt a little unwarranted because I saw it early and I was like, this movie is great," Brody said, recalling his initial impressions of the film. "I was really happy with it and pleasantly surprised. I thought it'd be good and I liked it more than I thought, even."

"To have it have such tepid reviews and box office, et cetera, and in a way to be a punching bag, felt s-----," the actor added. "It wasn't my movie so I didn't take the brunt of it but still it felt a little unjust."

Jennifer's Body has grown into its own cult following in recent years; Brody told The Independent that "it's been lovely to have it take its place in the pantheon of horror-comedy, heavily metaphorical movies."

The actor went on to say that marketing efforts for the film, which centered around Fox, now 36, just after she had broken out with her role in the Transformers series, "couldn't have missed the mark harder" as it promoted the movie from screenwriter Diablo Cody, who had just won an Academy Award for Juno in 2008.

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"It's about, among other things, the sisterhood that's corroded and you don't have both friends on the poster. It's just her in nothing she wears in the movie," Brody said, recalling Fox on the film's poster. "I just thought there's such great visuals in the movie, I can't believe you're not using these great visuals. This is the marketing person's dream and I feel like you're shying away from it."

"It was directed by a woman, starring two women written by that year's screenwriting Oscar winner and they're like, bury all of that," he added. "Don't tell anyone that. It's irrelevant that Diablo Cody just won an Oscar and she wrote this."

Fox herself said during a 2020 interview on Eli Roth's History of Horror: Uncut podcast that she felt Jennifer's Body "never really stood a chance" due to her own public image in the media at the time.

"I was being vilified a little bit when the movie was getting ready for its release," she said. "It was that interesting juxtaposition to shooting up to extreme heights of fame right before the movie was released and then … the tearing me down was starting to happen."