The 18 Best Back To School Movies to Watch in 2024

It’s early August, which means the first day of school is right around the corner — whether you’re looking forward to it or not.

We don’t know if you’ve noticed, but academic settings tend to be pretty popular in film — from the ’80s to right now, high schools and universities are where a lot of coming-of-age comedies and dramas take place because it’s where young adults spend most of their time.

From middle school to law school across every genre, the 18 movies on our Back to School Movies syllabus cover it all. Sports? Check. Fraternity life? Check. Falling in love? Check. Time travel? Sure! Musicals? Of course! We’ve even done the research so you don’t have to and told you exactly where you can stream each of these movies right now.

1. 10 Things I Hate About You

   10 Things I Hate About You is a quintessential teen comedy, and some of the movie’s best scenes actually take place in the classroom, including a scene toward the end of the movie where Kat (Julia Stiles) recites the Shakespeare-inspired poem the movie gets its name from.

   WHERE TO STREAM 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU

3. 17 Again

   Matthew Perry goes back to high school in the form of Zac Efron in this 2009 comedy. After Mike (Perry) is in an accident, he turns back into his 17-year-old self (Efron).

   WHERE TO STREAM 17 AGAIN

4. Akeelah and the Bee

   Brush up on your spelling before the first day. Keke Palmer takes on the Scripps National Spelling Bee in this inspirational drama that also starred Angela Bassett as Akeelah’s mother and Laurence Fishburne as her spelling coach.

   WHERE TO STREAM AKEELAH AND THE BEE

5. An Extremely Goofy Movie

   Max Goof heads off to college in this sequel to 1995’s A Goofy Movie expecting some time away from his dad’s antics… only to find out Goofy has enrolled at the same school to finish the degree he abandoned years before.

   WHERE TO STREAM AN EXTREMELY GOOFY MOVIE

6. Back to School

   What kind of back-to-school movie list would this be without Back to School? Rodney Dangerfield stars as a rich-but-uneducated father who enrolls in college to connect with his discouraged son who is also a student at that college.

   WHERE TO STREAM BACK TO SCHOOL

7. Bring It On

   It’s the Clovers vs. the Toros in this cult classic cheerleading movie that has an enduring legacy of addressing cultural issues (like systemic inequality and cultural appropriation) that most teen movies in 2001 weren’t. In 2009, legendary critic Roger Ebert called the film “the Citizen Kane of cheerleader movies,” and we have to agree.

   WHERE TO STREAM BRING IT ON

8. Clueless

   As if we’d make a back-to-school movies list and leave out Clueless! Amy Heckerling’s 1996 comedy takes Jane Austen’s Emma and sets it in a Beverly Hills high school — Cher, our Emma figure, gives a new student a makeover and plays matchmaker for her teachers.

   WHERE TO STREAM CLUELESS

9. Dead Poets Society

   Inspirational, sad, profound, stunning, motivational, and melancholic all at once, Dead Poets Society may be an unconventional choice for a back-to-school flick, but, hey, they are students. Robin Williams stars as John Keating, a new English teacher at an all-male boarding school, who inspires a group of students (Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, and Josh Charles among them), by introducing them to poetry in an unconventional way.

   “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”

   WHERE TO STREAM DEAD POETS SOCIETY

10. Good Will Hunting

    Good Will Hunting makes another more dramatic role for Robin Williams, and this one earned him an Academy Award. The film, which began as not much more than a class assignment while Matt Damon was a student at Harvard, starred Damon as the titular Will Hunting, a troubled mathematical genius working as a janitor at MIT.

    WHERE TO STREAM GOOD WILL HUNTING

11. Grease

    This 1978 musical comedy opens on the first day of school, when cool guy Danny Zuko (John Travolta) finds his summer fling Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton John) hasn’t gone back to Australia, but instead, enrolled at Rydell High. It became the quintessential idea of a ’50s high school movie despite being released in the late ’70s — these teens are doing the hand jive on American Bandstand, hanging out at the soda fountain, and even dabbling in high school sports.

    WHERE TO STREAM GREASE

12. High School Musical

    High School Musical actually opens with a premise not unlike Grease — Troy (Zac Efron) and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) meet singing a New Year’s Eve karaoke duet at a vacation resort, then basketball star Troy returns from winter break and discovers Gabriella now attends his high school. As the name implies, this is as much a musical itself as it is about a musical being produced at East High — when Troy and Gabriella try out it disrupts all of the various cliques at the school, from the theater kids to the academic decathlon team to the basketball squad.

    WHERE TO STREAM HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL

13. Legally Blonde

    From Legally Blonde comes one of the most iconic and quoted one-liners in recent film history: “What, like it’s hard?” Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) is a sorority girl about to graduate with a bachelors degree in fashion merchandising and thinks she’s on her way to getting engaged to her dream guy… when he dumps her. On a mission to win him back, Elle takes the LSAT and enrolls in Harvard Law School, where he’s headed after graduation.

    WHERE TO STREAM LEGALLY BLONDE

14. Mean Girls

    This classic teen movie is so fetch! New girl Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) joins “The Plastics” to fit in, falling for their leader Regina’s (Rachel McAdams) ex-boyfriend and uncovering the true nature of high school mean girls, the inner workings of cliques, and the benefits of just being yourself instead of trying to fit in.

    WHERE TO STREAM MEAN GIRLS

15. Monsters University

    Pixar’s first prequel takes us back to the beginning of James P. “Sully” Sullivan and Mike Wazowski’s friendship — the two meet at Monsters University and go from bitter rivals to the best of friends, joining a fraternity and learning how to work together with all of the members to achieve their goals.

    WHERE TO STREAM MONSTERS UNIVERSITY

16. Pitch Perfect

    Ultimately a movie about discovering your passions in a new stage of life, college freshman Beca isn’t really looking to fit in anywhere at Barden University, but she’s convinced to audition for the Bellas — Barden’s all-female acapella group. Now a member of the Bellas, Beca convinces them all to step outside of their comfort zones and revitalizes the team in a way that not even she expected.

    WHERE TO STREAM PITCH PERFECT

17. School of Rock

    Jack Black stars as Dewey Finn, a struggling musician posing as a substitute teacher who forms a band comprised of extraordinarily talented fourth graders, with an ulterior motive to have them win a battle of the bands so he can pay rent with their winnings. Fun fact: School of Rock was written by Mike White, who went on to create The White Lotus!

    WHERE TO STREAM SCHOOL OF ROCK

18. Sky High

    Even the kids of superheroes have to attend school, albeit a little differently than the rest of us. At Sky High, superpowered teens are immediately divided into two categories: hero or “hero support,” a.k.a. sidekicks. Will (Michael Angarano) is the son of legendary heroes The Commander (Kurt Russell) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston), but a lack of powers altogether get him thrown in hero support, but when friendly faces turn into foes and a new supervillain emerges, the sidekicks (including a pre-Succession Nicholas Braun as a guy who just… glows) have to band together to save Sky High.

    WHERE TO STREAM SKY HIGH

19. The Breakfast Club

    A brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal all walk into Saturday detention, and, well… you probably know how it goes. The iconic ’80s teen movie explores the different pressures put on teens by their parents and peers to act a certain way that isn’t so different from teenage life today.

    WHERE TO STREAM THE BREAKFAST CLUB