Directed by first time writer/director Pete Jones, Stolen Summer is the first film produced for Project Greenlight, an independent film competition created by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and sponsored by HBO.

[1] Project Greenlight aired on HBO as a documentary series chronicling the selection of Jones's script from approximately seven thousand entries, and the production of the film in Chicago in 2001.

The film's casting department considered the casting of the Jewish Adi Stein as the Catholic Pete O'Malley, an ironic joke due to the characters attempting to convert a Jewish boy to Catholicism.

The site's critical consensus is, "Stolen Summer feels like a sugary after-school special stretched out to feature length."

On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 36 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".