# Knocked Up
**Knocked Up** is a 2007 American romantic comedy written and directed by [Judd Apatow](https://www.edgepedia.org/judd-apatow), in which a one-night stand between an ambitious television journalist, Alison Scott ([Katherine Heigl](https://www.edgepedia.org/katherine-heigl)), and an aimless slacker, Ben Stone ([Seth Rogen](https://www.edgepedia.org/seth-rogen)), results in an unplanned pregnancy and an uneasy attempt at a relationship. It was released by Universal Pictures on June 1, 2007, rated R for sexual content, drug use, and language, with a running time of 129 minutes.[1](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knocked_up) • [2](https://www.universalpicturesathome.com/movies/knocked-up)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Release | June 1, 2007, wide release by Universal Pictures; produced by Apatow Productions and Universal[1](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knocked_up) |
| Leads | Seth Rogen as Ben Stone, Katherine Heigl as Alison Scott, with Paul Rudd as Pete and Leslie Mann as Debbie[1](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knocked_up) |
| Box office | $148.7 million in the United States and Canada; about $219.9 million worldwide against a budget reported as $30 million (IMDb) or $27.5 million (The Numbers)[3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478311) • [4](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Knocked-Up) |
| Critical reception | 90% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 249 reviews; 85 on Metacritic from 38 reviews, categorized as "universal acclaim"[1](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knocked_up) • [5](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/knocked-up/) |
| Rating | R, for sexual content, drug use, and language[2](https://www.universalpicturesathome.com/movies/knocked-up) |
| Follow-up | The 2012 spinoff *This Is 40* centers on the supporting couple Pete and Debbie, played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann[6](https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/streaming/5-best-paul-rudd-movies-ranked) |
## Spoilers
### Plot and characters
Alison Scott, a rising journalist at a Los Angeles television network, goes out to celebrate her first on-camera assignment, drinks too much, and ends up in bed with Ben Stone, an underemployed slacker who lives with his friends and dreams of building a website cataloging nude scenes in film history. A condom misunderstanding leads to pregnancy. Rather than raise the child alone, Alison gives Ben a chance to prove he can be a father, though both doubt they are compatible partners.[7](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/katherine-heigl-gets-knocked-up/) • [1](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knocked_up) • [8](https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2007/sep/09/dontknockknockedup)
A parallel storyline follows Alison's sister Debbie ([Leslie Mann](https://www.edgepedia.org/leslie-mann)) and her brother-in-law Pete ([Paul Rudd](https://www.edgepedia.org/paul-rudd)), whose marriage strains under the weight of two children and accumulated resentment. The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday, a film critic at the paper, judged these background scenes the film's most memorable, observing that what Apatow "really wants to talk about" is the psychosexual negotiation of modern marriage.[9](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/style/2007/06/01/first-comes-a-baby-carriage/0ac5d543-f103-4f4a-bbd1-98cb0879b867/) The supporting cast draws heavily on Apatow's regulars: [Jason Segel](https://www.edgepedia.org/jason-segel), Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and Martin Starr play Ben's roommates, and Harold Ramis appears as Ben's father.[2](https://www.universalpicturesathome.com/movies/knocked-up) • [5](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/knocked-up/)
## Production
Apatow wrote the film as a vehicle for Seth Rogen, whom he had cast in the canceled NBC series *Freaks and Geeks* in 1999 after a single audition, when Rogen was 16. The idea came out of a conversation in which Rogen was pitching large science-fiction projects; Apatow told him he did not need "bells and whistles" to be funny, and that he could be funny in an ordinary situation, "like you could get a girl pregnant." Apatow saw the premise as a place to draw on his own experiences with relationships.[10](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-may-13-ca-apatow13-story.html) • [11](https://abcnews.com/abcnewsnow/story?id=3230321&page=1)
Casting the female lead proved difficult. According to a 2025 Atlantic profile of Apatow, eighty women read for the part before Heigl auditioned. [Anne Hathaway](https://www.edgepedia.org/anne-hathaway) had reportedly been set to star but stepped away over concerns about the graphic childbirth scene; Apatow had originally planned to use real footage of a birth, an idea abandoned because of child labor laws.[12](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/judd-apatow-comedy-career/683975/) • [13](https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/graphic-reason-anne-hathaway-dropped-out-of-knocked-up-revealed/) Heigl, then known for *Grey's Anatomy*, described the production as heavily improvised, which she found daunting as someone who had never done improv.[7](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/katherine-heigl-gets-knocked-up/)
## Reception and box office
The film premiered at SXSW to a strong reaction and opened nationwide on June 1, 2007, grossing $30,690,990 in its opening weekend in the United States and Canada.[14](https://filmmakermagazine.com/1266-judd-apatow-knocked-up/) • [4](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Knocked-Up) It finished with $148.7 million domestically and about $219.9 million worldwide, a larger gross than Apatow's 2005 debut *The 40-Year-Old Virgin*.[3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478311) • [12](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/judd-apatow-comedy-career/683975/) Rotten Tomatoes reported early in the run that it was the best-reviewed wide release of 2007, at 92 percent at that point; its score later settled at 90 percent from 249 reviews, with an 83 percent audience score.[15](https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/knocked-up-is-2007s-bestreviewed-wide-release/) • [1](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knocked_up) Metacritic assigned a score of 85 based on 38 reviews.[5](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/knocked-up/)
In *The New Yorker*, the critic David Denby placed the film within what he called the slacker-striver romance, a genre built on the tension between male infantilism and female ambition, and called it "the culminating version of this story" and "one of the key movies of the era," a raw equivalent of *The Graduate* forty years earlier. He noted that the film revises classic romantic-comedy patterns: Ben does not chase Alison, she does not chase him, and the marriage plot is wary of marriage.[16](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/a-fine-romance)
## Criticism of gender and abortion
The film attracted sustained debate about its treatment of women and its handling of abortion. A Women's eNews commentary in June 2007 argued that the script turned abortion into a taboo, expunging it as an option for a character whose unintended pregnancy could wreck her career.[17](https://womensenews.org/2007/06/knocked-bans-abortion-script/) [Communication](https://www.edgepedia.org/communication) scholars Kristen Hoerl and Casey Ryan Kelly, writing in *Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies* in 2010, grouped the film with *Juno* and *Waitress* as 2007 releases that depoliticize women's reproduction: by bypassing abortion, the narratives reframe choice around the selection of heterosexual partners and investment in romance, ultimately restoring conservative ideas that valorize pregnancy and motherhood as women's imperatives.[18](https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/commstudiespapers/190/) In the film itself, the only character who suggests abortion is Alison's mother.[9](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/style/2007/06/01/first-comes-a-baby-carriage/0ac5d543-f103-4f4a-bbd1-98cb0879b867/)
Heigl herself criticized the film after its release, saying it treated women as "uptight" shrews while letting the men off for doing the bare minimum, a comment that touched off a larger debate about Apatow's work.[19](https://time.com/6308436/best-raunchy-comedy-movies/) • [12](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/judd-apatow-comedy-career/683975/) Defenders countered that the film portrays anxieties rarely shown in studio pictures, such as a woman hiding her pregnancy from employers for fear of being fired, and that its men are allowed to be non-macho and affectionate.[8](https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2007/sep/09/dontknockknockedup)
## Legacy
The film is regarded as a landmark of the mid-2000s R-rated comedy boom that Apatow led with *The 40-Year-Old Virgin*, *Superbad*, and successors, taking similarly themed comedies to hundred-million-dollar grosses.[20](https://urresearch.rochester.edu/fileDownloadForInstitutionalItem.action?itemFileId=188447&itemId=35830) Its characters Pete and Debbie returned in the 2012 spinoff *This Is 40*, directed by Apatow, with Rudd and Mann reprising their roles.[6](https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/streaming/5-best-paul-rudd-movies-ranked) The film's title itself has drawn scrutiny: as *Time* reported in 2019, "knocked up" has been used since the 1500s to describe impregnation, and the phrase carries an objectifying view of pregnancy that many contemporary writers avoid.[21](https://time.com/5587321/knocked-up-pregnant-synonyms/) The film remains available on streaming and home video, and retrospective reviews in the 2020s have treated it as a time capsule of 2007 comedy filmmaking while acknowledging the controversies around its gender politics.[1](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knocked_up)
## References
1. [Knocked Up, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knocked_up)
2. [Knocked Up, Universal Pictures At Home](https://www.universalpicturesathome.com/movies/knocked-up)
3. [Knocked Up (2007), IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478311)
4. [Knocked Up (2007), Box Office and Financial Information, The Numbers](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Knocked-Up)
5. [Knocked Up Reviews, Metacritic](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/knocked-up/)
6. [5 best Paul Rudd movies, ranked, Tom's Guide](https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/streaming/5-best-paul-rudd-movies-ranked)
7. [Katherine Heigl Gets "Knocked Up", CBS News](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/katherine-heigl-gets-knocked-up/)
8. [Don't knock Knocked Up, The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2007/sep/09/dontknockknockedup)
9. [First Comes a Baby Carriage, The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/style/2007/06/01/first-comes-a-baby-carriage/0ac5d543-f103-4f4a-bbd1-98cb0879b867/)
10. [The king of Geeks, Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-may-13-ca-apatow13-story.html)
11. [Get 'Knocked Up' With Judd Apatow, ABC News](https://abcnews.com/abcnewsnow/story?id=3230321&page=1)
12. [The Invention of Judd Apatow, The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/judd-apatow-comedy-career/683975/)
13. [Seth Rogen Says Anne Hathaway Left 'Knocked Up' Over Childbirth Scene, The Daily Beast](https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/graphic-reason-anne-hathaway-dropped-out-of-knocked-up-revealed/)
14. [Judd Apatow, Knocked Up, Filmmaker Magazine](https://filmmakermagazine.com/1266-judd-apatow-knocked-up/)
15. ["Knocked Up" is 2007's Best-Reviewed Wide Release, Rotten Tomatoes](https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/knocked-up-is-2007s-bestreviewed-wide-release/)
16. [A Fine Romance, The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/a-fine-romance)
17. ['Knocked Up' Bans Abortion from Script, Women's eNews](https://womensenews.org/2007/06/knocked-bans-abortion-script/)
18. [The Post-Nuclear Family and the Depoliticization of Unplanned Pregnancy in Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress, Hoerl and Kelly, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7:4 (2010)](https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/commstudiespapers/190/)
19. [10 Raunchy Comedies to Watch After Bottoms, Time](https://time.com/6308436/best-raunchy-comedy-movies/)
20. [Projecting Fandom, Revisions (dissertation), University of Rochester](https://urresearch.rochester.edu/fileDownloadForInstitutionalItem.action?itemFileId=188447&itemId=35830)
21. [It's Time to Rethink the Demeaning Ways We Describe Pregnancy, Time](https://time.com/5587321/knocked-up-pregnant-synonyms/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2007 to 2008 › Released in 2007*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license