The Surprise Hit Movie of the Winter Is a Terrible Omen for the Future
The surprise success of the Glen Powell/Sydney Sweeney movie Anyone but You puts rom-com fans like me in a tricky position. Like so many rom-com heroines before me, I’m torn—not between my head and my heart, or between some guy and some other guy, but about how to feel about this news.
On the one hand, its box office haul—per the Hollywood Reporter, it’s on track to earn $85 million to 100 million—suggests that audiences are still willing to leave their homes and fork over money to see two attractive people bicker, flirt, and eventually kiss, with no battle scenes or multiverse-hopping to speak of. It can still work, as long as you’re … big on TikTok! These results have brought with them a certain air of giddiness in the business surrounding the film’s achievement. “It has impressed Hollywood to the point where normally adversarial studio heads are gushing over the film’s astounding run as if it were their own,” according to a Thursday article in the Hollywood Reporter.
For the first time in a long time, Hollywood seems ready to reconsider the rom-com—and that’s nice, no? A few quotes from actors that have circulated on social media in recent weeks further reveal a growing sense of goodwill toward the genre: At the Emmys recently, Daniel Radcliffe told a red-carpet interviewer he’d like to star in a rom-com with Quinta Brunson. A few months ago, Paul Mescal said something similar about wanting to make one with Ayo Edebiri. It definitely speaks to a sea change that male actors, once reluctant to take on rom-com roles, according to no less than Kate Hudson, are now the ones suggesting them.
After years of rom-com fans lamenting the genre’s disappearance from big screens and relegation to streaming, Anyone but You should set the stage for more movies like it to get greenlit. So let’s all clink glasses as Natalie Cole’s “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” plays, right? Not so fast! What if, instead of inspiring a new romantic comedy golden age, Anyone but You opens the floodgates for a new wave of forgettable, formulaic rom-coms that no one actually wants? I fear it will.
After all, the pieces crowing about its hit status mention—but understandably don’t linger on—the fact that Anyone but You earned pretty terrible reviews across the board. It deserved them. To this romantic comedy enthusiast, the most remarkable thing about the movie, which is a loose (very loose) adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing set at a wedding in Australia, is how it managed to fumble so badly when it seemed to have almost everything going for it: an appealing cast, a director who’s made well-received rom-coms in the past, and the budget to do things big. All the pieces are there … except for a story that makes sense, characters that act like human beings, and really any romance or comedy.
I will attempt to summarize the plot here, but be warned that if it sounds absurd (confusing-absurd, not fun-absurd), that’s because it is: Sweeney plays a law student named Bea, and Powell is a finance bro named Ben. Their meet-cute is more of a meet-dull, prompted by her having to pee at a coffee shop—cool. They then spend the day together in chaste harmony before having a comically lame misunderstanding about how much they mean to each other. (By this point, they’ve known each other for, like, 12 hours.) They meet again later because her sister is marrying one of his friends, and when their hatred for each other starts to infect the vibe of the wedding, everyone suggests that maybe they actually like each other. In response, they decide to showily stage a fake relationship, partially to make some other random girl he likes jealous and partially to get her out of reuniting with her ex-boyfriend, who—stay with me—was invited to the wedding by (deep breath) her parents. Yup, a totally believable setup that we can all relate to and keep straight.
Powell does OK trying to sell this hunk of junk through sheer charm, but Sweeney, who’s proved herself a capable actress in her work on Euphoria and The White Lotus, may not yet have the chops to carry such weak material. She seems out of place, in part because her line delivery isn’t suited for such broad, personality-less dialogue. With the box office numbers the movie is pulling in, it’s hard to argue that Sweeney, who also served as an executive producer, made the wrong choice for her career. But I can’t help thinking she made a miscalculation that many others are poised to make right now in assuming that having all the right ingredients means that everything will just fall into place. The way people talk about rom-coms often fails to acknowledge the simple truth that it’s really hard to make a good one. People remember the classics and recent classics, but they forget that for every How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, there was a Raising Helen. For every You’ve Got Mail, there was an Addicted to Love. Don’t remember that one? Exactly.
How to explain all the cash the movie is raking in? I think people would welcome an actually good rom-com to see in theaters, but in the absence of that, maybe they’re more amenable than we realized to watching a bad one that at least has high production value on a big screen. As usual, I’m afraid Hollywood is going to take all the wrong lessons from this movie’s success. Studios now know they can plop two youngish stars into a slapped-together rom-com, market it with a few TikToks, and boom: profit. Although executives caring only about the bottom line is nothing new, after years of wishing that Hollywood would find its way back to movies for adults that aren’t driven by I.P., this is a real wake-up call about what it might look like when they do. Be careful what you wish for, right? I’m glad that we might finally be getting more big rom-coms. But it took until now to realize that’s no guarantee that a lot of them won’t be big old duds.
