Teenager Rick Stevens (Nat Wolff), has a crush on Nina Pennington (Selena Gomez). When Rick realizes that Nina broke up with her boyfriend Kevin Carpenter (Austin Stowell) he makes his move. He places a bet with Karlis Malinauskas (Nate Hartley), a mobster's son, that he will have sex with Nina before Arbor Day, leading to a serious chain of events from having sex with his best friend's mom (Elisabeth Shue), to having almost the whole town in jail, including Nina.
Principal photography took place at John Burroughs Middle School in Los Angeles, California in August 2012. The shoot took twenty days to complete. Originally titled Feed The Dog since it is based on the book While I'm Dead Feed the Dog, the film changed its name in August 2012 to Parental Guidance Suggested[3] before being revised to Behaving Badly. The third title revision was largely due to the Billy Crystal/Bette Midler film Parental Guidance in the 2012 holiday season having already claimed the title, causing possible confusion. Browde, the author of the original autobiographical novel, has disavowed the film as going against the source material of his book.[4]
The film received a 0% approval rating with an average rating of 3/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 17 reviews.[9] It holds a score of 18/100 on Metacritic based on 7 reviews, indicating "overwhelming dislike."[10]