There is nothing like early 2000s fashion, movies, and vibes. Two decades later we still cannot get over the cult classics: Bring It On, Honey, Drumline, ATL, and Love Don’t Cost a Thing. These films are not just nostalgia at this point. They are a mood board. The low-rise everything. The butterfly clips and oversized hoops. The way a car could be an entire personality. The specific, unrepeatable confidence of a movie that believed a makeover could change your whole life.
Which is exactly why the internet lost it this week when Christina Milian brought up a sequel herself.
What Christina Milian Actually Said
The moment came during an Instagram Live conversation with DDG that has since been clipped and pushed across Threads and TikTok by celebrity aggregator accounts. In the exchange, Milian asks DDG whether he has acted in anything yet, he says he wants to, and she tells him he could be in her sequel.
View the original post on Instagram
That single line is what the aggregators ran with. But listen to the rest of it and the story is different, and honestly better.
Milian talks about the sequel as her dream. She says she is going to make it happen. She credits TikTok directly, pointing to the flood of comments where people keep bringing up Paris Morgan, her character from the original. She says she can already see the faces that should be in it. And she is explicit that it should not just be her.
That is not a producer filling a role. That is the star of a twenty-plus-year-old film publicly campaigning to get a sequel greenlit, and doing it in the most 2026 way possible: by pointing at her comment section as evidence of demand.
What She Did Not Say
This part matters, because a lot of coverage is about to get it wrong.
There is no announced studio, no confirmed script, no production start, and no distribution deal. Alcon Entertainment produced the 2003 original, and no sequel has been announced through them. The IMDb page floating around for a Love Don’t Cost a Thing 2 has no cast or crew attached to it. “You could be in my sequel” was an invitation to a project that does not formally exist yet.
So no, DDG has not been cast. Nothing has been cast. What happened is that Christina Milian said out loud that she wants this, and asked the internet to help her get there.
A Word on the Fake Trailers
If you search this title, you are going to run into a wall of AI-generated slop, and you should know that going in.
For roughly two years, Facebook pages and YouTube channels have been posting “official trailers” for Love Don’t Cost a Thing 2 with release dates ranging from 2025 to 2026 and completely different cast lists each time. Some list Nick Cannon and Christina Milian. Some list actors who have no connection to the film at all. None of them are real. They are engagement farms using a beloved title as bait.
If you see a trailer, check the source. There is no trailer, because there is no movie. Yet.
Love Don’t Cost a Thing: A Refresher
Released December 12, 2003, Love Don’t Cost a Thing was written and directed by Troy Byer and starred Nick Cannon and Christina Milian, with Steve Harvey, Kenan Thompson, and Kal Penn rounding out the cast. Fabolous and Vanessa Bell Calloway also appear.
It is a remake of the 1987 teen comedy Can’t Buy Me Love, which starred Patrick Dempsey and Amanda Peterson, and original screenwriter Michael Swerdlick contributed to the update. The title comes from the Jennifer Lopez single released three years earlier.
The premise: Alvin Johnson is a science and engineering prodigy who cleans pools after school, saving up for a camshaft he needs to finish an engine for a scholarship project. Paris Morgan is the most popular girl at school. When she wrecks her mother’s car and needs it fixed fast, Alvin makes her an offer: he repairs it immediately, and in exchange she poses as his girlfriend for two weeks. She agrees. He gets access to the popular crowd overnight. And then he has to decide what it cost him.
The reviews were warmer than the remake premise suggested. Roger Ebert, who had been openly dismissive of the 1987 original, found the 2003 version sweet and touching, with better values and more poignancy than the film it remade. He also credited Cannon and Milian with a natural appeal that gave their characters more room than the plot allowed.
The Moments Everyone Still Posts
Rather than run a list of lines you can find anywhere, here are the scenes that keep resurfacing on TikTok two decades later, and why.
The pool boy reveal. Alvin’s nickname is not affectionate. It is the shorthand the school uses to keep him in his place, and the whole film hinges on how badly he wants to shed it. When it comes back around at the worst possible moment, it lands.
Steve Harvey’s sex talk. Alvin’s dad, played by Harvey, delivers advice with such enthusiastic, wildly misplaced confidence that it became the film’s most reliably clipped sequence. It plays as broad comedy and then quietly reveals itself as a dad who is thrilled his kid is finally being seen.
The transformation montage. Every element of the early 2000s makeover grammar is here: the new fit, the new walk, the new table in the cafeteria. It is also the exact moment the movie starts warning you about what it is showing you.
The Escalade. The car is not a prop. It is the inciting incident, the collateral, and the metaphor all at once.
Paris in every single frame. Milian’s wardrobe is the single biggest reason this film still circulates on style accounts. The comment sections she referenced on IG Live are largely people naming Paris Morgan as a personal style origin story.
Why It Still Hits: The Makeover Economy
Here is the read that makes this film more than nostalgia, and the reason we keep coming back to it at LUXE LIST.
Love Don’t Cost a Thing is a movie about buying access. Not clothes, not a car. Access. Alvin does not want an Escalade. He wants the social position that proximity to one confers. He pays for it with the only currency he has, which is skill, and the film is honest about the exchange rate. Two weeks of borrowed status costs him his friends, his father’s understanding of him, and briefly his own read on who he is.
That is the same equation running underneath most of luxury today. A card tier, a members-only door, a table that is not on the app. The object is rarely the point. The point is what the object signals and who reads the signal. The film understood in 2003 that status is a transaction with terms, and that the terms are usually worse than advertised.
The early 2000s were the last era that could tell this story straight, before social media made the makeover permanent, public, and unpaid. Bring It On did it with a cheer squad and put the theft of Black creative labor right in the plot. Honey did it with a dance studio and a Jessica Alba wardrobe that is still being recreated on TikTok. Drumline did it with a marching band, and it was Nick Cannon again, a year earlier, learning the same lesson about raw talent versus actual discipline. ATL moved it to Cascade and made class the explicit subject instead of the subtext, which is why it still plays as the most honest of the five.
All five are about the same thing: what it costs to be let in, and who sets the price.
The Sequel That Should Actually Get Made
Here is our pitch, and we think it is the obvious one.
Do not remake the original. Follow Paris Morgan’s daughter.
Paris is grown now. Whatever she optimized for at seventeen, she got, and the film opens with her holding it and not being sure it was worth the trade. Her daughter is coming up in a world where the makeover is not two weeks of borrowed status. It is a permanent, public, unpaid performance that started before she was old enough to consent to it. The Escalade is a rented handbag. The cafeteria table is an algorithm. And the mother who wrote the original playbook is watching her daughter run it back with far higher stakes and no exit.
Set it at college age rather than high school. That is where this story lives now, and it lets the cast actually breathe.
The Cast We Want to See
Milian said she can see the faces, and that it should not just be her. So here is our list. Add yours in the comments, because at this point the comment section is functionally the pitch deck.
The family
Paris Morgan. Christina Milian, obviously, and this time she is the one with something to lose. The woman who wrote the playbook at seventeen, watching her daughter run it back at twenty-two with far higher stakes and no exit.
The daughter. Chlöe Bailey. She has the presence to carry a film, the music-first audience the original had, and she can play a young woman performing confidence rather than possessing it, which is the whole assignment.
The dad. Bring Steve Harvey back. Non-negotiable.
The friend group
This is where the movie actually lives. The original gave Paris a crowd but never gave the crowd anything to do. Fix that, and you have a Bring It On ensemble with real teeth.
Olandria. She has never acted in a scripted role, which is exactly why it would work. She broke out of Love Island USA Season 7 as the person everyone trusted in a house built on not trusting anyone, signed with UTA in February, and landed on the 2026 TIME100 Creators list. She has been openly teasing bigger projects. The loyal friend who tells the lead the truth is a role that rewards presence over technique, and presence is the thing she already has.
Sydney Sweeney. The friend who has never had to think about access because she has always had it, and who slowly clocks that her friends are running a race she was born past the finish line of. Sweeney is very good at playing someone whose life looks effortless from the outside and is not, and this group needs one person the film can use to make the class question visible without saying it out loud.
Storm Reid. The best pure actress on this list. Give her the friend who is doing everything right and quietly falling apart under the performance, and she will walk away with the film’s one scene people cry at.
Zendaya and Marsai Martin, together. The comedic engine. Both are genuinely funny in a dry, quick, unimpressed way, and playing them off each other as the two friends narrating everyone else’s bad decisions is the most fun idea in this whole cast. Marsai should produce as well as star. She has been building exactly this kind of project since she was a teenager, and this is the title that needs her.
The rival and the guys
Coco Jones. Every version of this story needs someone occupying the throne the lead is climbing toward, and Coco can play her as genuinely magnetic instead of a cardboard mean girl. That is what makes the climb make sense.
Caleb McLaughlin, the nerd. The hardest role to fill and the one that makes or breaks the film. He can do the interiority the part needs and sell both halves of the transformation without turning either into a cartoon.
DDG, the popular guy. Since he was the one on the Live, give him the role that actually suits him: the guy at the top of the social order who does not think of himself as a bully because he has never once had to consider it from the other side.
And the question the whole internet will ask: is Alvin the father? Nick Cannon has never been shy about a reunion. We would let that one sit unanswered until the third act.
So, Is It Happening?
Not yet. But the demand is real, the star is publicly campaigning, and the algorithm is already doing the marketing for free. That is usually how these things start now.
If a sequel does get made, remember that it began in a comment section.
Who is in your dream cast? Tell us below and we will run the results.
