The state of the cheerocracy was not always so strong.

Twenty years ago, Bring It On opened to middling reviews and just respectable late-summer box office numbers, the latest in a seemingly endless string of low-to-mid-budget, PG-13 high school comedies. (A year later, the parody Not Another Teen Movie sighed glibly at the trend.) Bring It On seemed easily dismissible as factory-made fluff, no different than the usual foray into lunchroom caste systems, humiliation comedy, and a little light romance. But months later, Bring It On was a DVD phenomenon. A few years later, it was spun off into the same direct-to-video cottage industry that was built around American Pie, which had been a much bigger hit for Universal the year before. (The one difference: Bring It On’s five sequels did not have a Eugene Levy quietly cashing checks.) Now it seems like only a matter of time until cults collide and the 2011 musical version of Bring It On: The Musical, with music and lyrics cowritten by Lin-Manuel Miranda, gets a Broadway revival.

So what changed? It’s probably as simple as audiences assuming the worst of a teen comedy released in the dog days of August and slowly figuring out they were wrong. Bring It On wasn’t a radical break from end-of-the-century high school comedies, but it was simply better than them in every respect: bright, stylish, impeccably cast, and extremely funny, with the right mix of earnestness and irreverence in its approach to the world of competitive cheerleading. Working from an original script by Jessica Bendinger, first-time director Peyton Reed wrings all the laughs he can out of this combination of gymnastics, dance, and demented pageantry, but respects it as a sport of high stakes and true athleticism. The film also pivots on themes of cultural appropriation that not only seem unexpected in a cheerleader comedy, but remain pressing and pertinent 20 years later. Conversations about choreography fit right alongside conversations about white privilege.

[Read Scott Tobias's interview with Bring It On director Peyton Reed.]