What to Expect When You're Expecting (2012)
Directed by Kirk Jones
No — What to Expect When You're Expecting is not woke, scoring 15 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Kirk Jones assembled five couples, one pregnancy guide, and roughly the population of a mid-sized Atlanta suburb, then let them collide in a comedy that treats childbirth as a scheduling problem.
Consciousness Markers
The ensemble includes Jennifer Lopez, Chris Rock, Rodrigo Santoro, Kim Fields, Genesis Rodriguez, and Amir Talai, giving the cast a reasonably multiethnic makeup for a 2012 studio rom-com, though none of this is framed or commented upon.
The film centers women's bodily experience of pregnancy, and Wendy's viral convention meltdown explicitly counters the sanitized 'miracle of childbirth' narrative with the messy reality, though it remains a mainstream rom-com in structure.
Wendy's on-stage rant about the hardships of pregnancy functions as a brief sermon against idealized motherhood, but the film otherwise prioritizes gags over messaging.
The Ethiopian international adoption subplot and the multiethnic cast provide some racial texture, but the film makes no argument about race or systemic inequality.
The film engages with pregnant bodies, breastfeeding, and a fitness trainer's changing physique, but treats these as comedic material rather than advancing a body-positivity message.
There are no LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes anywhere in the film's five interlocking storylines.
No environmental or climate themes appear in the film.
Wendy's viral rant actually drives record sales for her breastfeeding boutique, making the film's economic logic cheerfully pro-entrepreneur rather than anti-capitalist.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
The film is a contemporary fictional comedy with no historical subject matter to revise.
Why it received this score
Kirk Jones assembled five couples, one pregnancy guide, and roughly the population of a mid-sized Atlanta suburb, then let them collide in a comedy that treats childbirth as a scheduling problem. The film is based on Heidi Murkoff's 1984 manual, a book that has sold twenty million copies and now serves as the launching point for ninety minutes of overlapping due dates. The structure is generous to its performers and merciless to its own coherence. Cameron Diaz vomits into a trophy. Elizabeth Banks weeps at a convention. The machinery grinds on.
Where the film gestures toward broader cultural awareness, it does so with the caution of a studio protecting its investment. The ensemble is multiethnic in a way that reads as deliberate casting instead of story requirement: Jennifer Lopez, Chris Rock, Rodrigo Santoro, Kim Fields, Genesis Rodriguez, Amir Talai. None of it is remarked upon, which is arguably the healthiest possible outcome. Lopez's infertility and Ethiopian adoption storyline supplies the film's only real racial texture, and it asks nothing of the audience beyond a sympathetic sigh. Elizabeth Banks runs a breastfeeding boutique, suffers a miserable pregnancy, and delivers a viral on-stage rant that punctures the sanitized miracle-of-childbirth narrative. It is a brief sermon against idealized motherhood, wedged between gags about circumcision.
The film's economic instincts are cheerfully entrepreneurial: the rant sells product, the boutique thrives, and the food truck partnership closes on a note of small-business optimism. There is no appetite here for structural critique, and no LGBTQ+ presence, no climate anxiety, no neurodivergent characters, no historical revisionism to speak of. Pregnant bodies are comic material, not a platform. What remains is a mild, well-cast, structurally bloated comedy that registers barely a tremor on the cultural seismograph. Twenty-three percent on Rotten Tomatoes feels about right. The babies are born. The credits roll. The classification is filed.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Part of
Synopsis
Challenges of impending parenthood turn the lives of five couples upside down. Two celebrities are unprepared for the surprise demands of pregnancy; hormones wreak havoc on a baby-crazy author, while her husband tries not to be outdone by his father, who's expecting twins with his young trophy wife; a photographer's husband isn't sure about his wife's adoption plans; a one-time hook-up results in a surprise pregnancy for rival food-truck owners.
Questions about What to Expect When You're Expecting
Is What to Expect When You're Expecting woke?
No — What to Expect When You're Expecting is not woke, scoring 15 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does What to Expect When You're Expecting have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (35). On Representation Casting: The ensemble includes Jennifer Lopez, Chris Rock, Rodrigo Santoro, Kim Fields, Genesis Rodriguez, and Amir Talai, giving the cast a reasonably multiethnic makeup for a 2012 studio rom-com, though none of this is framed or commented upon.
How does What to Expect When You're Expecting compare to other 2012 movies?
It ranks #57 of the 230 films from 2012 we've scored; their average is 12. The wokest is Killing Them Softly (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.