What Happened To Stifler?

Yeah! Yeah, baby! Don't speak me! Don't speak me! It's a high C

This was Stephen Stifler of the first American Pie. And this was Stephen Stifler in the final film of the core franchise, American Reunion

The sooner you realize that you're the b****, not the boss, the better off you'll be

F****r. What was that? Nothing! Nothing, Mr. Duraswamy. Whenever a character in a franchise unexpectedly pops with an audience

it can be very tempting for the powers that be behind the scenes to drive that character into the ground in future installments

In the case of Stifler, the character, who was once a beloved comedic breakout

quickly dwindled in the eyes of fans. The character became the embodiment of what happens when a franchise

tries to bring a side character to the forefront without remembering what made the character successful in the first place

Released in 1999, American Pie was a throwback to the 70s and 80s sex comedies like Porky's

or Animal House. It's brash, in-your-face, comedic sensibility pushed the boundaries of good taste and was

a massive hit with audiences in theaters and eventually home video. On a mere $11 million budget, it ended up raking in over $200 million

The film follows a group of high school friends who make a pact to lose their virginity by graduation

We will get laid! Stifler's role in the film, though, is largely extraneous

Although he is friends with the central characters, he is not part of the virginity contract

and so he's left out of much of the film's conflict. What

Whatever. He's there to provide comedic flavor to the film, not to be a driving force of the plot

He's portrayed as your typical party animal comedic archetype. Despite the film having an ensemble cast

Sean William Scott was undoubtedly the film's breakout star. The raunchy, unapologetic humor of Stifler became one of the film's highlights

I'll tell you one thing, though. I don think he gonna have a problem with sh school anymore Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is the way Scott stardom escalated between each film Popular movies like Final Destination Road Trip and Dude Where My Car cemented Scott

as a rapidly growing comedic on-screen presence. Meanwhile, his American Pie co-stars largely

appeared in middling comedies, never quite hitting the same heights as the American Pie films

with the exception of Allison Hannigan, who already had a following through Buffy the Vampire

Slayer and later co-starring in How I Met Your Mother. Scott's post-Pi success and the popularity of Stifler in the first film

led the filmmakers to the logical conclusion of making Stifler a bigger part of the franchise's

future plot lines. The gradual degradation of the character begins in American Pie 2

Stifler is given a larger role that's mostly entertaining, but Stifler is less a character

and more of a joke delivery mechanism. I got laid 23 times this year

and I'm not counting the hummer I got in the library stacks, baby. Sure, he's been given a larger role within the plot of American Pie 2

but his role just feels like an overinflated rehash of the last film

His primary character arc can really only be described as trying to get a pair of women

into a threesome, which, spoiler warning, he succeeds at. Granted, American Pie 2 isn't trying to do anything with the character that's all that

diversion from the first film. Stifler's primary job in film 1 and 2 is to be a comedic side character, and the sequel

largely pulls it off. Because he doesn't have to do any heavy lifting dramatically or in the film's conflict

he continues to be the entertaining bit player audiences loved the first time around

This film could have been the place to provide Stifler with more depth that could have supported

the character moving forward. The choice to make Stifler one of the primary characters in the

subsequent movies wouldn't have been so disastrous if we had spent more time making Stifler into a

three-dimensional character in either of the first two films. Even Scott admitted in a 2019 interview

with Entertainment Weekly to rewriting elements of the character way back in the first film to make

him more likable. Scott told EW, the Stifler character was in two or three scenes and he was

written to be such an a that I was like I don even know if I want to play this guy Scott could see from the first movie that the character needed work but this idea of the guy who wants to be loved the most never comes through in a dramatic or emotionally satisfying way in any of the films

despite the filmmakers' attempts late in the franchise. The minute Stifler becomes more than a colorful side character in the third film

American Wedding, is where things really begin to fall apart. In American Wedding, we are left with an emotionally flimsy plotline

that hinges on Stifler and Jim's friendship being some vital element to the series

At no point in the previous two films do we get any real sense of Stifler's relationship

with any of the individual central group of characters. He often seems like the barely tolerated braggart

so it's hard to believe that he has a uniquely special relationship

specifically with Jim. Without that investment, much of American Wedding's conflicts just aren't compelling

The film strains us to get us invested in the ongoing conflict of Stifler's repeated failures

to make Jim's wedding a success. It also doesn't help that numerous side characters

don't appear in this installment, including Chris Klein's Oz, who always felt like more

of an actual friend to Jim, and the other central characters than Stifler

By elevating Stifler to this larger role, the series truly begins to develop diminishing returns

on the character and his humor. The outrageous sex jokes that once made Stifler

such an unexpected and unpredictable source of comedy have now grown stale

These problems are exacerbated even further by American Reunion. The belated 2012 sequel intended to cap off the American Pie saga

Here, Stifler is essentially one of the emotional cruxes of the film

He is a pathetic depiction of a man whose life peaked in high school, now working a dead-end job with a demeaning boss

The rejection he faces by his high school friends is meant to be tragic

Jessica, it's good to see you. No, it wasn't. What the? But it all seems like a reasonable response to a guy who hasn't matured

since the end of high school. None of the groundwork has been laid for an emotionally satisfying arc

and therefore, the audience feels nothing. So what can we learn from all of this

Perhaps the most important takeaway is that less is often more When a character unexpectedly hits big with an audience it easy to want to immediately increase that character role in a story

Perhaps the best illustration of this is Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. Like

Stifler, a character who was once a colorful side character was eventually elevated into essentially

the series' primary protagonist. By doing this, those brief flashes of comedy and quirky

characterization become tired, rote, and most fatally, predictable. Now, that's not to say a side character can't ever be elevated to lead status

Perhaps the best and most recent example of this is Breaking Bad's Saul Goodman, who

was, in a way, a stifler type. He was a character with a brief, plot-adjacent role that would have an impact in big comedic moments

Saul not only grew in prominence in Breaking Bad, he became the lead of the spinoff Better

Call Saul. The key here is simply depth of character. By providing Saul Goodman with clear motivations, backstory, and desires, we came to understand why

he acted the way he did and saw him as more than comedic relief or a cool background character

Unlike Stifler, he was a real character that we could relate to

Without this understanding of Stifler's inner psychology, even if it were revealed to be

comedic, we don't care about the struggles the series puts him through later on in the franchise

As Scott himself said in the EW interview, he's probably really insecure. He's like the guy who wants to be loved the most

There is something that does feel tragic about Stifler, the man whose life will inevitably peak

in high school, and who likely hides his insecurities behind his brash sense of humor

But we never get any sense of this side of the character in the early installments when it

matters most. Any attempts to make Stifler more than a bit player

later in the franchise are dead on arrival because he is just a bunch of sex jokes

in the form of a person. Come on, guys. That was pretty funny. Yeah, maybe in high school it was funny

Now it's just a felony. Sometimes it's better to let a character, even one

as beloved as Stifler, stay a supporting player rather than elevating them to the starring role