"Love, Simon" is in many ways an ordinary high school film, one of those glossy, endlessly watchable and entertaining romps made in the vein of all those John Hughes classics of the 1980s with a modern edge, like the love-child of "Sixteen Candles" and "Easy A."
But "Love, Simon" has one difference: The protagonist is gay.
And that fact makes the film, in theaters Friday, a landmark release for major Hollywood studios. It wasn't all that long ago when its director Greg Berlanti had to fight tooth and nail to get the first romantic kiss between two men on television screens on "Dawson's Creek." He remembers he had to threaten to quit for the idea to even be entertained. That was 2000.
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It wouldn't be until 2015 when Becky Albertalli's book "Simon vs The Homo Sapien's Agenda," about a 16-year-old boy who hasn't yet come out to his friends and family, caught the eye of Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen, the producers responsible for everything from "Twilight" to "The Fault in Our Stars." Always on the hunt for a fresh angle in the teen romance genre, they and Fox 2000 executives realized Simon's story was it.