A Beloved Sandra Bullock Movie Is Coming to Netflix in September

September kicks off with a classic action comedy coming to Netflix – Miss Congeniality starring Sandra Bullock. The 2000 movie was a commercial success and a cultural phenomenon, and it perfectly represents a genre that has faded in Hollywood. In the wake of Bullock's success in The Lost City, this one is definitely worth revisiting when it hits Netflix on Sept. 1.

Miss Congeniality stars Bullock as FBI agent Gracie Hart, a lifelong tomboy who is forced to go undercover as a beauty pageant contestant for the sake of a high-stakes mission. The tough, direct crime-fighter has to confront the type of femininity she has always avoided and become Miss United States in order to stop a domestic terrorist threat. Along the way she comes to realize that strength and beauty are not mutually exclusive – it only appears that way due to systemic misogyny.

The movie was written by Marc Lawrence, Katie Ford and Caryn Lucas, and was directed by Donald Petrie. Bullock is joined on the cast by Benjamin Bratt, Michael Caine, Candice Bergen and William Shatner, among others. The movie was filmed on a budget of $45 million and earned a total of $212 million worldwide.

Miss Congeniality wasn't an overwhelming critical success – though it wasn't a flop either. At the time, critics praised Bullock while taking a few digs at the script, saying that the actress had an uphill battle to overcome the material she was working with. However, much of what they criticized at the time is regarded as a lost virtue in Hollywood today. These days, everyone from creators to critics to fans laments these kinds of mid-budget original movies as a thing of the past. The action-comedy genre, too, has largely fallen by the wayside.

Bullock has done her part in trying to revive mid-budget action-comedies in the 2022 film The Lost City. It was the highest-grossing movie of the year that was not based on a pre-existing intellectual property. She also commented on the state of the industry in January of 2022, Telling THR that streaming had become the only home for movies with smaller budgets, original concepts and older actors. She said: "They're good to artists. They're good to filmmakers. If it wasn't for Netflix, a lot of people wouldn't be working."

Hopefully some fans will get a renewed sense of the value of mid-budget action-comedies when they revisit Miss Congeniality next month. The movie comes to Netflix on Sept. 1, 2023.