Comingsoon.net is skipping sports tryouts to spend the summer reading about cinema’s greatest nerds. Check out our picks in the gallery below!
An audience connecting with a film’s lead is all but required to have a good moviegoing experience. Oftentimes, this is achieved by utilizing the concept of a hapless, lowly main character. Nerds make perfect leads for this exact reason: everyone knows a nerd (or is a nerd, or was a nerd), which means everyone is able to relate to a nerd in some way or another.
However, a nerd isn’t always a taped-up-glasses wearing, button-up clad social outcast—in fact, movie nerds have come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. From billionaires to superheroes to treasure hunters to world-savers, nerds make for some of the most compelling main characters imaginable.
nerd movies
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Ghostbusters (1984)
Peter Venkman, Raymond Stantz, Winston Zeddemore, and Egon Spengler are four of the most recognizable nerds in movie history. These four men make up the Ghostbusters, aided by Louis Tully and Janine Melnitz—it’s truly a hall-of-fame for the nerd movie genre.
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Jurassic Park (1993)
A classic bit of encouragement for all the high school nerds is that, more than likely, they’ll be the ones in charge of all the bullies in the working world. No movie embodies this principle better than Jurassic Park, a movie about a bunch of scientists who almost destroy the world with their unrestrained intelligence.
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Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
A prime example of what a Sundance hit looks like, 2004’s cult classic Napoleon Dynamite remains one of the most-quoted comedies even after all these years. Jon Heder embodies the nerd from everyone’s high school, bringing a level of humanity and lovability to an otherwise instantly recognizable character.
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Rushmore (1998)
Wes Anderson’s second feature stars Jason Schwartzman as Max Fisher, a private school nerd who has the hots for his teacher—the problem is that he has to fight an older man for her attention. It’s an aspect of nerd culture that always gets touched on (the idea of an un-swoon-able love interest), but none so well as Anderson does here.
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Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)
Edgar Wright seems like a nerd at heart, especially when considering that all his movies have served as tributes to the films that proved to be so influential to him. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a love letter to video games, one of the nerdiest things imaginable, so it only makes sense that the titular geek Scott Pilgrim should be one of the most lovable nerds in film history.
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Spider-Man (2002)
Peter Parker as Spider-Man might be the most interesting superhero to date. Across all three live-action iterations of the character in the past twenty years, Spider-Man has proven to be the seminal nerd and the ultimate hero in one.
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Superbad (2007)
Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg when the pair was still in high school, Superbad rightfully earns itself a spot on this list of movie nerds. A young Jonah Hill and Michael Cera embody the young versions of the movie’s writers, two high school nerds who try and squeeze four years of high school experience into one short night.
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The Goonies (1985)
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The Princess Bride 1987
Richard Donner’s 80s touchstone The Goonies is one of the most important nerd movies ever because it features a whole slew of sympathetic geeks, all embodying a different stereotypical nerd—complete with a jock of a big brother. The Goonies is nerd movie perfection, honestly.
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The Social Network (2010)
Mark Zuckerberg is the ultimate nerd. It’s undeniable. David Fincher’s The Social Network portrays him perfectly, with all his flaws intact. He’s smart enough to create the most popular and recognizable social media site in the world, but so socially inept that he cut down almost every person who stood in his way.
