21-year-old student asks 2.5 million TikTok viewers to come to 'Project X'-style birthday party: 'Everyone's invited' - Yahoo Life

When a London-based student decided to invite everyone on TikTok to his 21st birthday party, he didn’t anticipate that over 2.5 million people would watch his video.

In a follow-up TikTok, Omar Dhadra announced he was starting to plan an event for hundreds of people after his video went viral. He hashtagged the countdown with #projectx, a reference to the 2012 movie of the same name about a bunch of high school seniors who want to throw an unforgettable party.

Project X currently holds an approval rating of 28% on Rotten Tomatoes — a score that hasn’t really budged since its initial theatrical release. The overall consensus on the popular movie review-aggregating site is that it’s “unoriginal, unfunny and all-around unattractive.”

Despite its low score and poor reviews, it made a pretty significant cultural impact that’s clearly carrying over more than a decade later. Pretty much any younger millennial could tell you exactly where they were the first time they heard Kid Cudi’s Pursuit of Happiness, one of the lead tracks and breakout songs from the Project X soundtrack.

Dhadra is not the first person to come up with the idea of throwing a Project X party. When the movie first came out, there were three major headline-making house parties in the U.S. alone that were trying to re-create the idea of throwing a massive, chaotic party. That doesn’t count the international attempts, any smaller-scale parties or the subsequent Project X-inspired gatherings that have happened since 2012.

Dhadra isn’t even the first person to come up with posting a party address on TikTok. The trend popped up on Australian TikTok in mid-2022, where young users were sharing party locations and addresses on their accounts to try to build up a large crowd. But none seemed to have gotten the traction Dhadra’s announcement did, nor has it been confirmed whether any Project X-style parties ever actually happened.

But Dhadra’s party did in fact happen, and its success is indicative of a larger change going on among Gen Z when it comes to nightlife and partying.

Followers anticipated it would be chaotic considering the build-up — OnlyFans star Lauren Alexis even commented on Dhadra’s original video — and Dhadra kept posting footage of his partying days as evidence that he could pull off throwing a proper Project X party.

In another video, Dhadra bragged about hosting a “huge party in London that plays new wave dance music and tickets are free.” He shared outfit inspo for the party, posted flyers in dorm halls and even had to change the location in anticipation of the guest list.

Vice reporter Ryan Gladwin actually attended the party and said bar staff near the venue even seemed nervous about the turnout. According to Gladwin, police had contacted the original space and asked them to cancel the event, which is also why Dhadra moved locations.

Dhadra told Gladwin that the Project X theme was in response to British nightlife, which he felt was disconnected from the younger generation. In multiple TikToks, Dhadra expressed a similar sentiment about how the clubbing experience was expensive with bad music and worse people.

The party did not reach the level of chaos of Project X, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the movie, a Mercedes gets driven into a pool and someone brings a flamethrower and sets fire to pretty much everything.

But the success of Dhadra’s party highlights the disconnect between Gen Z and the traditional nightlife industry. A 2022 community-led report found that the correlation between the pandemic shutting down clubs during Gen Z’s formative partying years may have been a factor. Interestingly, the report agrees with Dhadra’s TikToks, in that Gen Z interviewees told the study “listening to music they like in a club was their top reason [for enjoying clubs].”

It seems Dhadra and other TikTokers who have hopped on the trend of inviting the whole platform to their birthday party are simply really into the aesthetic of what Project X or the U.K. show Skins perpetuates.

In a subreddit dedicated to 22-year-old rapper Ken Carson, fans celebrate his “mid-2000s party aesthetic from project X” in one of his music videos. Carson’s 2021 debut album, Project X, was named after and inspired by the movie and the artwork references the movie’s poster.

“I love that aesthetic period,” one Reddit user wrote.

“Bro fr project x is so fire,” another agreed.

Even the aesthetic of the movie, which was filmed as an amateur home video from the perspective of a party guest, is reappearing on social media today. Disposable cameras, high-flash and performatively authentic photos and videos are everywhere on TikTok and Instagram and capitalize on nostalgia for the early and mid-2000s.

As with most trends, the Project X obsession is cyclical. With the increasing backlash against exclusive influencer-only events, it makes sense that Gen Z is gravitating toward a “come one, come all” attitude. As for Project X‘s future, it seems that no matter what generation, it will be considered “the greatest party movie known to man.”

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