General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Kissing Booth 2

The Kissing Booth 2 is a 2020 American teen romantic comedy released on Netflix, directed by Vince Marcello and starring Joey King, Joel Courtney, and Jacob Elordi. It is the second film in the Kissing Booth trilogy, adapted from Beth Reekles's novels, and follows Elle Evans through her senior year of high school while her boyfriend Noah attends Harvard.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	July 24, 2020, on Netflix¹
Director and writers	Directed by Vince Marcello; screenplay by Marcello and Jay Arnold, based on the Kissing Booth books by Beth Reekles²
Running time	131 minutes³
Budget	$15 million³
Main cast	Joey King (Elle Evans), Joel Courtney (Lee), Jacob Elordi (Noah), Taylor Zakhar Perez (Marco), Maisie Richardson-Sellers (Chloe), Meganne Young (Rachel), Molly Ringwald (Mrs. Flynn)⁴
Critical reception	29% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (42 reviews) and 38% Popcornmeter; Metascore 39 on Metacritic; 5.7/10 on IMDb from about 45,000 votes⁵^•⁴^•⁶
Age rating	TV-14⁴

Spoilers

Plot

The film picks up where the first movie ended. After a romantic summer together, Noah Flynn leaves for Harvard and Elle Evans returns to high school for her senior year. She juggles the long-distance relationship, applying to her dream college with her best friend Lee, and a close friendship with a charismatic new classmate, Marco Peña (Taylor Zakhar Perez). When Noah grows close to a college girl, Chloe (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), Elle must decide how much she trusts him and where her heart belongs.²

Subplots include Lee's girlfriend Rachel feeling sidelined as Elle and Lee spend time together, Elle's secret applications to Boston schools that threaten her shared plan with Lee to attend UC Berkeley, and the revival of the charity kissing booth, for which Lee pushes Elle to recruit Marco as one of the kissers.⁹^•¹³

Availability and sequels

The film streams on Netflix, where it is available in 131 countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and is not currently offered on other major subscription services.¹⁶ A third film, The Kissing Booth 3, followed in 2021, completing the trilogy; Reekles has said no fourth film is planned.¹⁰

Origin and production

Netflix announced the sequel on February 14, 2019, as a Valentine's Day surprise, confirming that Joey King would return alongside Joel Courtney and Jacob Elordi. The first film, released in 2018, had been an enormous hit for the service and its most re-watched movie of that year.⁷^•⁸

The source material traces back to Wattpad, the social publishing site where the Welsh author Beth Reekles began posting The Kissing Booth as a serialized story at age 15; its popularity there earned her a book deal, and the movie rights were sold to the UK production company Komixx in early 2013. The film adapts the sequel novel The Kissing Booth 2: Going the Distance, in which Elle and Noah face a long-distance relationship after he leaves for Harvard.⁹^•¹⁰^•¹¹

Marcello, who wrote the first film alone, co-wrote the sequel with Jay Arnold. In an interview with Creative Screenwriting, he described the film as less a romance than "a coming of age story about three kids – Elle, Noah, and Noah's brother Lee," and said the kissing booth itself functions as a crossroads where the characters admit and discover their feelings for one another.¹²

Reception

Critical response was unfavorable. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 29% Tomatometer from 42 reviews and a 38% Popcornmeter audience score from more than 500 ratings; the site's critics consensus credits Joey King with making the film better than it could have been while calling it a slapdash sequel. Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 39 from 12 critic reviews, labeled generally unfavorable, with a user score of 3.3 from 74 ratings, 64% of them negative. IMDb users rate it 5.7 out of 10.⁵^•⁴^•⁶

Reviewers repeatedly flagged the length. At 131 minutes, critics called it a slog for a teen comedy; The A.V. Club's Caroline Siede wrote that it broadens the first film's world without deepening it and feels more like a spinoff TV series, while IndieWire's Kate Erbland, in the most positive major review (58), found some necessary character growth but judged it unable to rise beyond familiar genre complications. Several critics singled out Joey King's committed performance and the addition of Taylor Zakhar Perez as strengths.³^•¹⁴^•⁵

The Time review took a warmer view, calling the film "kind of terrible and kind of wonderful" and arguing that its faith in first love and friendship lands for viewers open to it; the same review noted that Elle is no longer an object for men to possess and that the story prizes personal growth.⁹^•¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026