Bad Teacher

Bad Teacher follows Elizabeth Halsey, a middle school teacher who has no interest in teaching and treats her classroom with open contempt. She drinks, gets high and spends her days showing films to her students while she waits to marry a wealthy man and leave the job behind for good. When her fiancé breaks off the engagement, she is forced back to the school she had hoped to escape. Her plan is to win over a new substitute teacher who comes from money, but a hardworking colleague named Amy stands in her way, and the school's sarcastic gym teacher keeps pressing his own unwelcome advances. Elizabeth's schemes unsettle her students and coworkers, and above all herself.

Jake Kasdan directed the film, working from a screenplay by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg. It was released in 2011 as the fourth of the nine features Kasdan has directed, arriving between Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Sex Tape. Cameron Diaz plays Elizabeth, with Justin Timberlake, Jason Segel, Lucy Punch, Phyllis Smith and Kaitlyn Dever among the cast.

Made for a budget of 20 million dollars, the film took in about 216 million dollars worldwide, a strong return on its cost. Audiences received it moderately: it holds a rating of 5.7 out of 10 on IMDb from roughly 222,000 votes, and 5.6 out of 10 on TMDB from around 5,000 votes.