For decades, author Judy Blume refused to allow the book to be adapted into a film. However, she changed her mind when the director Kelly Fremon Craig promised to be faithful to the story. As a result, Blume was delighted with the film so much that she considered it better than the book she wrote, saying in an interview, "I love the movie - and how many authors of the book can say, 'I think that movie is better than the book'?"
During the graduation fair, the Grabber's van from Black Phone (2021) can be seen in the background. This is because both movies were shot in North Carolina during the same year and used much of the same crew and period-appropriate vehicles.
In a 2023 interview with Flickering Myth, Kelly Fremon Craig spoke about why she chose to focus some of the story on the mother, played by Rachel McAdams: "I am always cognizant of shifting POV in a film, where you can do it, and how to do it in a way that threads through and isn't distracting from the story. But when I reread the book as an adult, I was really struck by Barbara. Whereas when I read it as a kid, I was oblivious to the parents. I was oblivious to anything that didn't have to do with the kids. But there were a few little seeds in there that made me think Barbara was an interesting character, and I wanted to see what would happen if we dug deeper into her and gave her her own journey. And I'm a mom who's struggled with balancing my role with my career and how much time I devote to my career. So I wanted to explore that. A lot of the maternal guilt I feel, you know, because I do work so much. I wanted to explore all that in Barb's character. The seeds were there in the book. So I was able to plant them to see what would grow."
Margaret's parents and grandmother appear to own push-button (touch-tone) rather than rotary dial phones. Although dial phones were still the predominant type of home phones during the period this movie is set (the very early 1970s), it is not an anachronism to show characters with touch-tone phones; in 1963, AT&T first made available the first subscriber touch-tone service in the United States.