Project X wants to be a party you crash. Instead it hands you a camera and asks you to watch three kids torch a house for 88 minutes.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Three Seniors and a Birthday
Nima Nourizadeh directed Project X from a script by Matt Drake and Michael Bacall. Todd Phillips produced it through Green Hat Films with Silver Pictures, and Warner Bros. Pictures put it in U.S. theaters on March 2, 2012. It made $102 million worldwide against a $12 million budget.
The setup is lean. Costa and J.B. throw a party for their friend Thomas Kub’s 17th birthday in Pasadena, hoping to raise their standing at school. Thomas’s parents leave for the weekend and warn him: keep the crowd small, and do not touch the Mercedes-Benz CLS.
Thomas says no. Costa does it anyway.
Dax and the Camera
The film presents itself as a home movie shot by an attendee. That attendee is Dax, an A/V student Costa hires to record the night. Dax Flame, who plays him, was found through his personal YouTube video blog. Flame said of the role: “Because he’s holding the camera, my character doesn’t have a lot of screen time, but when he does, it’s very impactful.”
He is right about the screen time. He is wrong about the impact.
Craigslist and a Radio Station
The party starts empty. Thomas panics. Then everyone arrives at once, Miles Teller included. Costa hired two kids, Everett and Tyler, as security. It does not hold. Costa admits he advertised on Craigslist and a local radio station.
Here is how the night runs, in order:
| Beat | What happens |
|---|---|
| Early evening | Party start time passes, nobody shows |
| Later | Partygoers arrive en masse, Miles included |
| Then | Thomas limits the party to the backyard and pool house |
| Then | Crowd pushes into the house |
| Then | Thomas has a breakdown in the bathroom |
| Then | Costa confesses the Craigslist and radio ads |
A Cast of Unknowns
Phillips and producer Joel Silver ran a nationwide open casting call, open to any U.S. resident over 18, through a dedicated website. Applicants sent videos of themselves telling embarrassing stories or dancing. The goal, Phillips said, was “unknown actors” and “real people of all ethnicities.”
The result gave the film its only real asset: faces you have not seen.
- Thomas Mann auditioned seven times for Thomas after being told he could not try out at all.
- Project X is the feature debut for Oliver Cooper and Jonathan Daniel Brown.
- Kirby Bliss Blanton plays Kirby, who has an unrequited crush on Thomas.
- Alexis Knapp plays Alexis, a role she said required nudity she initially had “a lot of moral issues with.”
What the Found Footage Buys
Almost nothing. The conceit is announced and then abandoned. The camera shakes. The camera keeps rolling. That is the whole idea, and it is not enough to carry a feature.
The film’s defenders called it funny and thrilling, and compared it to a modern National Lampoon’s Animal House. The criticism landed harder, and it was about the leads: behavior reviewers called “loathsome,” and a shrug at what drug use does to the people doing it.
The Miles Teller Problem
Miles Teller plays a fictionalized version of himself — a celebrity actor and college baseball star. It is the one joke in Project X that has an actual idea behind it, the recognition that fame is now a thing teenagers can smell from across a parking lot. The film does not know what to do with it. It invites him, he shows up, he leaves.
What the Camera Actually Records
Project X is a 2012 American found footage teen comedy that mistakes volume for escalation. Every beat is a louder version of the last one, and the found footage frame never earns its keep. The open casting call was a genuine idea, and the young cast is the reason any of this is watchable. Handed better material, several of them clearly had somewhere to go.
What the film documents is a house getting wrecked by kids who will not face a consequence. That is not a party. That is a premise with a camera pointed at it.
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