Disney's Cheaper By The Dozen: The Biggest Differences To 2003's Movie
Warning! SPOILERS for Disney's Cheaper By The Dozen.
The Disney+ Cheaper By The Dozen remake presents a 2022 update to a familiar story - here are the biggest differences between Disney's 2022 remake and the 2003 movie. Streaming March 18, 2022, this remake stars Zach Braff as Paul Baker and Gabrielle Union as Zoey Baker, the well-meaning parents of a large family of children. It’s the fifth Cheaper By The Dozen movie to be released, following the remake of the 1950 movie in 2003 that stars Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt as the parents to the impressively large Baker brood. All of the Cheaper By The Dozen movies are based on the 1948 novel of the same name, which was written by siblings Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey about growing up as part of a family with twelve children. While the 1950 film tells the story of the Gilbreth family, the 2003 and 2022 movies tell their own stories about fictional oversized families.
Like in the 2003 movie, the 2022 Cheaper By The Dozen follows the Baker family, a modern family trying to keep it together with a large number of children under one roof. The 2022 Baker parents, Zoey and Paul, are both divorced when they meet at Paul’s diner when Zoey and her kids come in for breakfast. The two films include similar story elements, such as the father’s career moves uprooting the family and forcing them to move to a new place where they don’t truly fit in. The sudden changes in both movies are hard for the families to adjust to, which causes the parents to lose control over the situation. The 2022 update also keeps certain elements of the family structure, such as the youngest children including two sets of twins. Even the second oldest daughter's obsession with her image, played by How I Met Your Father's Hilary Duff in the original, is transferred over, changing her from an aspiring fashionista to an aspiring influencer to fit in with a 2022 world.
The bones of the story are more or less the same, but the 2022 version has quite a few differences from the film that hit theaters nearly 20 years ago. Though Cheaper By The Dozen isn't a new concept, the 2022 version tries its best to be a story that represents modern American families - albeit clumsily at times. So, what are the major differences between the 2003 version and the Disney+ remake?
One of the biggest changes is the Baker family structure. In the 2003 film, all of the Baker children were born to both parents, who had been together since college. The 2022 version is more like the classic Lucille Ball film Yours, Mine, and Ours, in that some of the children come from the couple's previous marriages. Paul's ex-wife Kate (Erika Christensen) and Zoey's ex-husband Dom (Timon Kyle Durrett) both are recurring figures in the movie and the lives of the characters, as parents to the older Baker children. Paul and Kate had also adopted their godson Haresh (Aryan Simhadri), who lives with Paul and Zoey along with their four children from previous marriages and four children together. The blended family concept is representative of how a lot of American families fit together in a modern world. Blended families have become more common as divorce has become less of a stigma. The choice not to make all of the children in this version of the Baker family related to both parents normalizes families like theirs.
In the 2003 movie, the Bakers have 12 children, just like the family in the original novel. The children are the titular dozen, and the story is about Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt's Tom and Kate trying to take care of 12 children while trying to advance their own careers. That's not the case for the 2022 Bakers. They have nine children between them and become a "dozen" when Paul's nephew Seth (Luke Prael) comes to live with them. The 10 children and two parents are counted together to make the dozen, rather than just a dozen children. The focus on the whole family as the dozen comes full circle in the end when they rename the restaurant "Baker's Dozen," including Seth in their company brand and family.
Steve Martin's Tom is a football coach in the 2003 Cheaper By The Dozen. He gets a job coaching at the college where he used to play, which is what makes the family have to move. The dad played by Scrubs' Zach Braff, however, is a chef who owns a breakfast restaurant that he runs with his family. His family moves into a bigger house after he gets an investor to help him bottle and sell his signature sauce. The football element isn't completely dropped, because Dom, Zoey's older two kids' father, is a professional football star. Dom's focus on his football career is what initially pushed him away from his family, and in the film, he and Paul have a bit of competition for his children's affection. However, just like Tom does at the end of the 2003 movie, both Paul and Dom choose to do what's best for the kids and be there for their family.
In the 2003 remake, the oldest daughter Nora (Piper Perabo) is 22 and already living away from home with her model and actor boyfriend Hank (Ashton Kutcher). The oldest son Charlie, played by Smallville star Tom Welling, is a star football player with hopes of getting a scholarship to play football in college. Deja (Journee Brown) is the oldest child in the 2022 film and is a star basketball player at her high school. The gender swap is a good way for the movie to avoid some of the gender stereotypes that the 2003 version played on, but the swap is also probably why she's a basketball player instead of a football player. Football is still largely played by men and it would be difficult for a girl to be taken seriously as a football player, especially on the college level. Deja, however, does have a similar interest in boys to Nora and gets in trouble for going to spend the night at her boyfriend's house.
The Bakers in the 2003 movie live in a farmhouse in Midland, Illinois, and move to Evanston when Tom gets a job coaching football at his alma mater. The Bakers are presented as an All-American Midwestern family, and they don't fit in with the people in the city. The 2022 Bakers, however, are from Echo Park in Los Angeles, CA. Their move is to Calabasas, a suburb of LA, and just like in the 2003 version, they struggle to fit in. This time, however, they feel out of place because they are a largely mixed-race family with a lot of children, and some of their wealthy neighbors and schoolmates see them as strange.
Bonnie Hunt plays the Baker family matriarch Kate Baker, a woman who dreamed of being a sports reporter but gave up her dream job to raise her children with her husband Tom. In the film, she is writing a novel about her experiences raising such a large family and is on the verge of getting a deal to have it published. Zoey, however, never truly stopped working. Instead, she dedicated her marketing skills to helping Paul redefine and market his restaurant from a general diner to a breakfast restaurant. All of the Baker kids who are old enough also work in the restaurant, making it a family business like the restaurant in Bob's Burgers. When Paul gets the opportunity to turn the restaurant into a franchise, Zoey feels pushed out because he starts going on business trips alone. In the 2003 version, however, Kate goes away on business to promote her book, which she's titled Cheaper By The Dozen. The level of chaos that ensues without her is far bigger than what the family in the 2022 film gets up to, however. The 2003 movie focuses a lot more on slapstick comedy, while the 2022 movie deals a lot more with what Zoey is going through trying to hold down the fort without Paul there.
The most obvious difference between the 2003 and 2022 versions of Cheaper By The Dozen is that the Baker family is now interracial. Zoey is an African American woman married to Paul, a white man. The movie attempts to handle race delicately, but it does address the racial difference between Paul and Zoey and how racism affects her and their children of color. Aside from being a Black and white blended family, they also are parents to Haresh, a South Asian tween, who experiences racist bullying at school. This change from the 2003 movie means that the characters address their racial differences, sometimes clumsily. The bullying that Haresh experiences isn't fully addressed by any adult in the movie, leaving the kids to deal with it themselves. Zoey's ex-husband Dom also expresses concern over his two teen children Deja and DJ being raised by a white father, but the concern seemingly comes out of nowhere and is quickly forgotten after the family goes together to find their runaway cousin Seth. However, the attempt at telling a story about a diverse family in a children's movie is a good move by Disney.
The Disney+ version of Cheaper By The Dozen attempts to update the story, just as the 2003 version updated it for the time. Although it borrows a lot from the 2003 movie, including the last name of the family, it distinguishes itself from the Steve Martin classic by giving these Bakers distinct lives and problems. While the Bakers are an oversized family in every version, the 2022 Bakers represent blended and interracial families, which have become more common than they were in 2003.