Image Source: Bold Entertainment
David Henrie is making his feature-film directorial debut with Bold Entertainment’s This Is the Year, and he has a few familiar faces joining him for the ride. The comedy, which Henrie also wrote, follows a high school senior (played by his brother Lorenzo) as he attempts to win over his longtime crush by embarking on a road trip to see their favorite band at a musical festival. What ensues is an action-packed adventure filled with some surprising self-realizations.
When writing the script, the 31-year-old actor was especially inspired by ’80s coming-of-age movies he grew up watching. “They tended to make me feel good and I’m a fan of feel good entertainment,” he told POPSUGAR. “So I wanted to [pay] homage [to] some of those movies that I love and watched as a kid but do them in a more current, relevant, sensitive time and flip a lot of the tropes on their head that those movies were perpetuating. A lot of times the pretty girl in those movies didn’t have a full arc and females were portrayed in a more competitive kind of spirit. So we put all that on its head.”
“It was a blast getting to write it because we set it with a very current theme of expectation versus reality,” he continued. “I feel like nowadays we’re so inundated with so much external stimulus that you can expect love to be a certain thing based on what you see in social media or movies or TV shows, etc. And in reality that’s not the case a lot of the time. So I wanted to play with that in the movie and you see that being wrestled a lot in the film.”
In addition to having a uplifting storyline, the film also features an incredible cast, including Vanessa Marano, Alyssa Jirrels, Jake Short, and Bug Hall. Henrie even makes a quick cameo as the ’80s actor Lorenzo’s character lo