Synopsis: It’s Girl Scout Cookie season, and four tenacious girls strive to be a top-selling “Cookie Queen,” navigating an $800 million business in which innocence and ambition collide.
Stars: Olive, Nikki, Ara, Shannon Elizabeth
Director: Alysa Nahmias
Rated: G
Running Length: 91 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Alysa Nahmias turns Girl Scout Cookie season into a coming-of-age story with real stakes. It never blames the parents and never squeezes you for tears, which is exactly why you’ll cry anyway. Warm, funny, and sharper than it lets on.
Cookie Queens Review: This Is Not Troop Beverly Hills
No, they wouldn’t dare. Cookie Queens is not a remake of Troop Beverly Hills, and nobody here is Phyllis Nefler. What Alysa Nahmias has instead is four real Girl Scouts, one cookie season, and a movie that peels back the foil wrapper on a wholesome American ritual to find real drama underneath. It looks like a sugar rush. It plays like a coming-of-age story. Every Cookie Queens review out of its world premiere at Sundance said a version of that, and the standing ovation backed them up.
It opens August 7 from Roadside Attractions, sharing multiplex space with Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. Both are great. Neither one will wreck you like a mother at a dining room table, doing the math out loud with her husband and working out that the boxes they purchased for their daughter to sell so she could attend Girl Scout Camp aren’t going to move. Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, produce under their Archewell banner, which explains some of the attention the film is getting and none of the reason it works.
Four Wagons, Six Weeks, and an $800 Million Machine
Nahmias, who won an Emmy for Art & Krimes by Krimes and co-directed Unfinished Spaces, follows four scouts through a single selling season. Olive is 12, from Charlotte, and holds records she’d like to beat. Nikki is 9, from Chino, California, growing up behind two big sisters who owned their city. Shannon Elizabeth is 8, from El Paso, and she’s selling her way to Girl Scout resident camp. Ara is 5, from San Diego, diabetic, and doing Pilates to build the strength to pull her own wagon. That last part isn’t a joke, and the movie plays it perfectly straight.
Here’s the machine they’re feeding. Cookie season runs January through April, with digital and pre-orders opening the year and booths hitting storefronts in February. It moves roughly 200 million boxes and clears about $800 million, with close to 700,000 girls working it. In 2024, the season Nahimas filmed, Thin Mints went from five dollars to six in most councils. Families front the cash for inventory that may never move. That’s not a bake sale. That’s a supply chain with a fourth grader at the register.
There’s no performance to grade, though the older two do seem more camera-aware than the little ones. Antonio Cisneros shoots it plainly and lets faces carry it. Amanda Jones scores it light. No production designer, no costume designer, just real kitchens, real driveways, real uniforms.
Ara Does Pilates. Nikki Wants In. Shannon Elizabeth Wants Camp.
Ara is the joy engine. Often blissfully unaware she’s being filmed, she hauls her wagon down sidewalks and across sand, and by Week 3 she hasn’t moved a single box. Her parents don’t panic. The fix turns out to be almost insultingly simple. The second she actually asks a person to buy cookies, sales go through the roof. Do or do not, as a small green fellow once put it.
Nothing can prepare you for how funny she is. Her delivery is flat, factual, and lethal, and a stretch of cold calls to potential buyers had my practically falling off the sofa. None of it is written. She’s answering honestly. Credit everyone involved for treating these girls with respect and, just as importantly, as the ages they actually are. Nobody has to be camera-ready or interview-ready. This, like selling cookies, is supposed to be fun.
Nikki gives the film its beating heart. She wants in with her older sisters, and you get the sense the selling is partly a bid to be counted among them. When sales get serious and her mother routes the real work to the more experienced two, it pangs in a way the movie never underlines. It just lets you sit there with it and watch as Nikki’s eyes tell us she’s used to taking the back seat even though she’s ready to drive.
Shannon Elizabeth’s thread is the least developed but carries the most fragile feelings of the four. It’s also where the film finds its fullest sense of family, in how her troop welcomes and initiates new members, and in her mother talking about their culture. The smallest scenes here carry the biggest weight and when it’s time to rally to get to her goal, don’t be surprised if you find your fists clenched, chugging forward, demanding that she get her wish to go to camp.
The Thin Mint Line Between Her Goal and Theirs
Then there is 12-year-old Olive, already fluent in her own overachieving. That’s the part that gets you. She can name it. Eight-hour selling days, self-shot promo videos, a running tally in her head, an etiquette and manners class wedged into a week that already holds middle school. Nahmias tags along for all of it. Watch closely and you’ll catch Olive asking her parents, in her own roundabout way, for permission to stop. They answer by telling her how gifted she is. So she keeps going, and she can see the burnout coming from a long way off.
The conversations are where the film gets brave. Olive says they work too hard for too little. She wonders whether her parents want the sales more than she does, and whether this is her last year. She’s savvy about the camera, too. When her parents commit on the record to easing off, you can almost watch her file it away as evidence for later. The lens stops being an observer and becomes a place to set things down. Nahmias never turns this into an exposé on parenting. She indicts the system and lets the families off the hook, which is the harder and fairer call. When Olive says she wants to be a Chief Justice one day, I not only believed her, I believed IN her.
You Have Until January. Get Your Order In.
My one real gripe is the missing origin story. Juliette Gordon Low registered 18 girls in Savannah in March 1912. Five years later the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Oklahoma baked a batch in a high school cafeteria for a service project, and an $800 million industry grew out of it. Membership sat near 2.8 million in 2003 and runs closer to 1 million today. Five minutes on any of that would have given the pressure some shape.
Tally the ledger anyway and it runs well ahead. Four subjects you’d happily follow into a sequel. A film that names the pressure without ever blaming the parents. A stretch of cold calls from Ara worth the ticket on its own. Set against all that, only Shannon Elizabeth’s thread wants more room than it gets.
What lands hardest is the honesty. You’ll well up near the end, but not because the movie corners you into it. It’s because these girls are drawn so fully that you want every last box to sell becuase really, these girls aren’t selling cookies. They’re auditioning for the rest of their lives, and they don’t know it yet.
Here’s the lovely accident of the release date. The next season doesn’t open until January, so the film hands you five months before a kid in a green vest ever knocks. Use them. Learn the difference between Samoas and Caramel deLites. Work out what your number is. Because when that order form finally comes around, you’re not buying from a stranger. You’re buying from an Olive. Or an Ara. Or a Nikki. Or a Shannon Elizabeth.
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