21 Things You Probably Didn't Know About "Bring It On"

Kirsten Dunst wasn't the first choice to play Torrance.

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1. Bring It On was originally titled Cheer Fever.

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2. The iconic opening number was almost cut from the film.

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Screenwriter Jessica Bendinger fought with producers to keep satire in the script. “I was like, ‘If you cut this cheer, then it’s just a dumb movie! Who cares?’" she told the Huffington Post. "You need to let everybody know your tongue is in your cheek. There needs to be self-awareness.”

3. The character of Torrance Shipman, the new Toros cheerleading captain, was modeled after Gwen Stefani.

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Bendinger had a No Doubt poster hanging above her desk while she was writing Bring It On, and tried to inject the band's coolness into some of the movie scenes.

4. Kirsten Dunst wasn't the first choice to play Torrance.

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Marley Shelton was the first actor cast in the role, but she ultimately dropped out of Bring It On to star in Sugar & Spice, a movie about bank-robbing cheerleaders.

5. Gabrielle Union, who played Isis, the captain of the Clovers cheerleaders, was also nearly cast in Sugar & Spice.

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She didn't get the part, which she later told MTV was because Sugar & Spice "didn’t want to go black on any of the characters." Union said she was happy that Bring It On was more committed to diversity.

6. Before being cast as former Toros captain Big Red, actor Lindsay Sloane first auditioned for the part of Torrance.

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7. Out of all her acting roles, Dunst says she relates to Torrance the most.

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"I was that girl," she told Gotham. "It was like me being in high school as myself. It wasn’t a stretch at all. I was a cheerleader, my best friend was a cheerleader. I wasn’t in competitions, but I watched them on TV."

8. This was the first film directed by Peyton Reed, who went on to direct Ant-Man.

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9. Everyone who auditioned for the movie had to have a cheer prepared.

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And once they'd finalized the cast, producers sent all of the actors to cheerleading camp for four weeks.

10. James Franco and Jason Schwartzman both auditioned for the role of Cliff.

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Franco was then unavailable because he was cast on Freaks and Geeks, and the studio wouldn't agree to Schwartzman, so the part ultimately went to Jesse Bradford.

11. The members of the girl group Blaque played the best friends of Isis (Gabrielle Union), the captain of the Clovers.

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It was the first acting experience for the singers, who kept looking into the camera by accident.

12. It cost production $40,000 to secure the rights to "Cherry Pie" during the audition scene.

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Bring It On had a relatively low budget of $10 million; buying the song was their biggest single expense.

13. During filming, Eliza Dushku (who plays Missy) and Jesse Bradford took a trip to Mexico and got arrested.

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Luckily, they were bailed out and just barely made it back to the set to film the bikini car wash scene.

14. Union kept her Clovers uniform after filming.

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15. One scene nearly caused the MPAA to give Bring It On an R rating.

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During one of the routines, male cheerleader Jan sticks a finger inside Courtney's underwear — and he was originally supposed to smell his finger afterwards. After cutting the finger-sniffing out of the scene, the MPAA agreed to give the film a PG-13 rating.

16. Lin-Manuel Miranda co-wrote the music and lyrics for the Tony-nominated Bring It On: The Musical.

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However, the musical is not a direct adaptation of the movie; it instead features an entirely new plot about a cheerleading squad at an inner-city school.

17. Riley Smith, who plays the cute male cheerleader Les crushes on at Nationals, currently stars on The CW's time travel cop show, Frequency.

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18. Many of the cheerleading moves performed in Bring It On would have gotten the teams disqualified from competition.

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According to to National Federation Interscholastic Spirit Association, flyovers and any moves that are more than two bodies high are not allowed for high school teams and would result in immediate disqualification.

19. And the Clovers make a big mistake in their final routine.

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During their performance, two cheerleaders accidentally run into each other — something they definitely would have lost points for in real life.

20. Several scenes featuring more of the Clovers' backstories were cut from the final film, though they still appeared in the movie trailer.

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21. And finally, Bring It On originally had a completely different ending.

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At first, instead of the cast dancing and lip-syncing to "Hey Mickey," there was an alternate ending filmed featuring Torrance and Isis joining the cheerleading squad at U.C. Berkeley (it's included on the DVD extras).