According to the assumptions by which Hollywood usually operates, Pitch Perfect should never have been an success.  It was a musical about nerds, a film about women made mostly by women, with no box office stars to its name.  It wasn’t a sequel, a remake, a superhero movie, or any of the typically bankable films that Hollywood regularly pumps out.  Its eventual success happened not in spite of the things seemingly stacked against it, but because of them.  It was a film that celebrated women the way it celebrated music, and served not the stereotypical male “geek culture” that movies like The Avengers cater to, but instead it embraced the nerd inside of us.  The one that’s sometimes awkward or embarrassed, that hides from the world around us, but is immensely passionate about whatever it is that we love, music or otherwise.  And in the end it made big stars out of its cast of familiar faces.  There is no other movie among my friends and acquaintances that is as universally loved as Pitch Perfect, and it is always one of the first answers given to the question, “What should we watch?”  Its passionate fanbase meant that a sequel was inevitable, and the only question was whether they could recapture lightning in a bottle and make something as special as the film that captured so many hearts.  The answer isn’t quite so simple, but Pitch Perfect 2 is still a lot of fun, and it fills a niche that is too often ignored by Hollywood.

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