8 / 10
Freaky Friday is the body-swap premise Disney has now adapted four times across nearly fifty years.
Mary Rodgers wrote the 1972 novel. Gary Nelson directed the 1976 original starring Jodie Foster as the daughter and Barbara Harris as the mother. Mark Waters directed the 2003 remake starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. Steve Carr directed the 2018 Disney Channel television version with Cozi Zuehlsdorff and Heidi Blickenstaff.
Nisha Ganatra directed Freakier Friday in 2025, in which Curtis and Lohan returned as their original characters, now both mothers, who body-swap with the daughters of the next generation. Body-swap comedies usually wear me out, and this one wins me over anyway, mostly on the strength of Curtis and Lohan in 2003. I think that version gets as much out of the premise as anyone ever will. The other three have their charms, and the 2003 film is the only one that makes me laugh out loud.
The premise is durable. A mother and daughter who disagree with each other are magically forced to live each other’s lives for a day. They develop sympathy through experience. They return to themselves having learned something. Every version of the story uses this template. Every version finds its charm in the performances instead of in the plot.
The 2003 Version
The 2003 version is the best of the four.
Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan are both funny across the body-swap section. Curtis plays a teenage girl trapped in a forty-five-year-old psychiatrist’s body. Lohan plays a middle-aged woman trapped in a fifteen-year-old’s body. Both performances commit completely. Curtis discovering she can drink at a restaurant is among the best individual comedy beats of the early 2000s. Lohan trying to perform adult psychiatry on her mother’s patients is another.
Curtis steals it for me. A teenager’s recklessness loose in a psychiatrist’s body is the funniest I think she’s ever been on screen, and Lohan keeps pace with her beat for beat. I’d call this pairing some of the happiest casting Disney has managed. The film made approximately one hundred and sixty million dollars worldwide on a twenty million dollar budget. It was the high water mark of Lohan’s pre-tabloid career and a late-career standout for Curtis. Both performers seem to be enjoying the work, which the audience reads as energy on screen.
For Writers
Body-swap comedy succeeds when both performers commit equally to playing the other character’s mannerisms. The 2003 Freaky Friday works because Curtis is playing a teenager and Lohan is playing a middle-aged woman. Neither is half-committing. The lesson is that any premise involving role reversal requires both halves of the reversal to be fully realized. If one performer commits and the other coasts, the central premise collapses. Both ends of the swap have to land.
The 1976 Version
The 1976 original is the rougher version of the same story. Jodie Foster was thirteen and Barbara Harris was about forty. The film treats the body swap as broader physical comedy than the 2003 version. Foster plays the mother trapped in her body with the kind of adult exasperation a thirteen-year-old shouldn’t be able to perform. Harris plays the daughter with childlike enthusiasm. Both performances are good in their own tone, but the film around them is dated in ways the 2003 remake successfully updated.
The Disney studio of 1976 was a different operation than the Disney studio of 2003, and the original has the slightly cheap live-action look of the period: small budgets, flat lighting, and staging that’s competent instead of ambitious. I still like it.
Barbara Harris is a delight as a grown woman bouncing around with a kid’s enthusiasm, and I think she’s the best thing in that version. It’s charming, and it’s also clearly a film from 1976.
For Writers
Production values affect how stories age more than scripts do. The 1976 Freaky Friday and the 2003 remake share the same core story. The 2003 version reads as contemporary because the production was contemporary. The 1976 version reads as a period piece because the production was 1976. The lesson is that the way a story is produced is part of how the story will be remembered. Scripts age slowly. Production aging accelerates. Spend energy on the production layer if you want the work to travel.
Freakier Friday
The 2025 sequel brought back Curtis and Lohan twenty-two years after the remake. The premise added a generation. Anna, Lohan’s character from 2003, now has a teenage daughter. The body swap now involves four people across two generations.
The film made approximately ninety million dollars worldwide on a forty-five million dollar budget. The reviews were polite. The performances were warm. The film was made for people who saw the 2003 version when they were children and now have children of their own.
Nostalgia drives the film. Curtis and Lohan are both visibly happy to be doing this again, and their happiness is hard for me to resist. The film has nothing new to say, and I’d have liked a sharper script, but it has the right people saying it, and that counts for a lot with me.
For Writers
Legacy sequels work when the original cast wants to be there. Freakier Friday brought Curtis and Lohan back twenty-two years later and the audience could see they were happy about it. Compare this to legacy sequels where the cast looks like they cashed a check. The lesson is that you can’t fake enthusiasm in a returning performance. If your sequel depends on returning cast, make sure the cast wants to be there. The audience will read the difference.
Craft Note
The Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis body-swap performances are the film’s central craft achievement. Both actresses commit to playing the OTHER as themselves trapped in the wrong body. The technique requires careful physical and vocal coordination that the production achieves through specific gestural callbacks (the way each touches her hair, the way each holds a phone). The performances show that body-swap comedy depends on the actors agreeing on character mannerisms before the cameras roll.
Is Freaky Friday worth watching?
The 2003 version is the best, and I give that one a 9.
The 1976 original is a charming period piece (7/10), and the 2025 sequel is a warm, competent legacy follow-up (7/10). The 2018 Disney Channel version is functional and skippable (5/10), and it’s the only one I’d tell you not to bother with. The overall 8 is carried hard by the 2003 film, and that’s the one to watch first.
