After starring on Zoey 101, Victoria Justice cemented herself as a tween icon when she
took on the lead role in Nickelodeon's Victorious.
But since then, Justice has had a hard time landing major roles, and she's definitely
not as visible as she once was.
Here's why.
Hollywood is a world of niches.
Once stars become known in a certain genre, style, or medium, it's hard for them to be
accepted in other kinds of roles.
Victoria Justice has two of these career roadblocks in her way.
First, she was a teen star.
Second, she'll forever be linked with Victorious, the show that made her a household name.
By 2012, Victorious was a huge hit with kids, and Victoria Justice was, too.
So much so that Nickelodeon decided to cast the actress as the lead role of a theatrical
film - Fun Size.
Unfortunately, Fun Size got just 25% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Justice’s fan base didn't
flock to see the movie either.
It earned just $9.4 million at the box office.
In 2015, MTV placed Victoria Justice at the center of a more mature drama called Eye Candy.
A creepy thriller in the vein of hit scripted shows like Teen Wolf and Scream, Eye Candy
was based on a book of the same name by horror master and millennial icon R.L. Stine.
Justice played a tech wizard named Lindy, who gets involved in a sinister online dating
situation.
A potential mate turns out to be a violent cyber stalker.
This was a major stylistic shift for Justice, but fans just didn't respond.
MTV shut down Eye Candy after a single season, where it averaged less than 600,000 viewers.
Over the 2010 to 2013 run of Victorious on Nickelodeon, star Victoria Justice and scene-stealer
Ariana Grande made 57 episodes of kid-com TV magic together.
But, unfortunately, there were whispers that they maybe kind of hated each other.
Rumor has it that Justice made life a nightmare for Grande on set.
Justice attempted to "set the record straight" on a January 2015 episode of The Meredith
Vieira Show.
"So basically, there was an article in Seventeen magazine where she had said that she was bullied
on set, and the magazine basically alluded to it being me."
But there was more to the story.
Justice continued,
"It got out there everyone thought I was this bully and that I was mean to her, which couldn't
be further from the truth."
Be that as it may, even a fictional notion that Justice is mean and difficult to work
with could have hurt her reputation, and it appears to have done just that in this case.
As the breakout stars of Victorious, Victoria Justice and Ariana Grande used the show to
help launch singing careers.
Justice's time as a singer came first, and her songs were all over the soundtrack for
Spectacular!, a made-for-TV musical that was Nickelodeon's answer to High School Musical,
and three Victorious compilations.
Justice scored a couple of minor hits from those albums, such as "Freak the Freak Out"
and "Best Friend's Brother".
And...that's it.
Justice's music career fizzled out just as Victorious left the air.
Without the series to showcase her music, Justice got overlooked by radio stations and
music buyers.
Soon, Victoria was cast in The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again.
Unfortunately, this TV musical failed to produce much interest from anyone.
Justice had the necessary acting and musical chops for this role, but for some reason,
this revival of the old classic did not cause a stir.
Since MTV discontinued Eye Candy in 2015, star Victoria Justice continued to appear
on television - just not as regularly or in the starring roles she once enjoyed.
The next few years brought a smattering of parts you may or may not have heard of.
After showing up on two episodes of Undateable, the actress appeared on a couple installments
of Cooper Barrett's Guide to Surviving Life.
Justice then appeared on Matt LeBlanc's Man with a Plan, as well as on American Housewife.
These small roles didn’t reignite her career, though, so what’s left for the ex-Nickelodeon
star?
To move into the future, one must sometimes look to the past ...and latch onto it.
As the TV industry has been obsessed with reboots and reunions in recent years, even
mildly successful shows have staged a comeback - everything from Twin Peaks to All That.
Old fan bases are waiting and new fans quickly jump on board.
Basically, the climate is theoretically ripe for some kind of Victorious revival.
It's not something that's been publicly announced or anything - at least so far in 2020 - but
Victoria Justice, perhaps looking for a boost from revisiting familiar territory, is already
very much on board.
Justice said as much to HuffPost back in 2016:
"If the decision was ever made to do a reunion, I'd be down for that, and I think everyone
else would be too.
It was all kind of like a theoretical thing, and it never really came to fruition."
Victoria Justice may not be headlining a top-rated, long-running sitcom anymore, but by no means
is she all washed up.
First of all, she's only in her mid-twenties, so she's got plenty of time left to make it
again in show business.
She's still working, too, and on projects that are way different than Nickelodeon sitcoms
and MTV dramas.
Near the end of the 2010s, Justice starred in two potentially major film projects.
One of them was 2019's Summer Night, an ensemble comedy-drama.
The other was Bigger, a 2018 bio-pic about Joe and Ben Weider, the brothers who basically
started America's obsession with fitness in the mid-20th century.
Unfortunately, neither Summer Night nor Bigger enjoyed a wide release, and Justice wasn't
even featured on the poster of the latter.
Starring on Nickelodeon in the 2000’s was no small feat.
Victoria still has plenty of fans from that era, and she received her due at the time,
in the form of 3 Kids’ Choice Awards nominations.
However, that old visibility in pop culture is long gone, and it looks like it might be
a while until there's justice for Victoria.
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