This year, for the first time in a while, a movie gave me the boost of serotonin that only hits my brain when I'm watching a great rom-com. It happened near the end of the Netflix film Hit Mandirected by Richard Linklater and starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona. Powell plays Gary Johnson, a college professor moonlighting as a fake hit man to help cops catch people who are trying to hire a contract killer. At this point, Gary has fallen in love with Arjona's Madison, whom he'd earlier saved from arrest by convincing her not to have her jerk husband offended. Now, she's done something really bad, and Gary knows about it. Sent to confront Madison at her house while wearing a wire, Gary begins tapping out notes to her on his iPhone with instructions about how to sell their story to the authorities who are listening in. The scene is pure screwball energy, with Gary and Madison's mouths saying words their eyes and bodies don't mean.
Over the last several years, there's been much lamenting the disappearance of the rom-com. But is this classic Hollywood genre really dead? My answer: It's complicated.
While the rom-com is most commonly associated with the Eighties, Nineties, and 2000s — the peak era of writer-directors such as Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers, and screen icons like Meg Ryan, Hugh Grant, and Julia Roberts — the genre is essentially as old as cinema itself. It's going to take a lot more than a few fallow years to kill it. And as I worked on my new book, a history of the genre titled Falling in Love at the Movies: Rom-Coms From the Screwball Era to TodayI found reasons to be hopeful for its longevity, even if the outlook seems grim from where we're standing.
A survey of the past year in rom-coms tells this rocky story. Things started out on a positive note with the Sydney Sweeney-Glen Powell vehicle Anyone But Youto riff on Much Ado About Nothing that opened without much fanfare in December 2023, then slowly built an audience via social media and ended up grossing over $200 million worldwide. But very few rom-coms have gotten wide theatrical releases of late, and the ones that didn't live up to expectations. The Fall Guyabout a stuntman played by Ryan Gosling trying to win back his former love, a director played by Emily Blunt, was a rom-com in action-movie clothing. Despite (or maybe because of?) this genre-bending it had an anemic performance at the box office, grossing just a hair over its production budget. And barely anyone saw the back Fly Me to the Moona 1960s-set Space Race story in which Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum did their best Doris Day and Rock Hudson.
Meanwhile, the quite delightful The Idea of Youan Amazon original based on a novel that was a BookTok sensation, was relegated to streaming-only. Anne Hathaway brought her sparkly charm to the story of a fortysomething gallerist mom who falls for the Harry Styles-esque singer in a boy band. They meet cute when she accidentally walks into the bathroom of his private trailer during Coachella. (Ah, love.)
Hathaway is a holdover from a previous era of rom-coms. She got her start working with one of the kings of the genre, Garry Marshall, Hon The Princess Diaries. I love her in this mode, winning but with an earthiness to her that makes these heroines feel real.
Yet as I weigh the state of the rom-com in 2024, my mind keeps coming back to Powell, who's started to feel somewhat like a one-man advocate for the genre. Hit Manwhich he co-wrote, was perhaps not sold as a romantic comedy, but watching it, there's no denying that rom-com is in its DNA. The central tension of the movie is not whether Gary will be found out as a fake, but whether he's going to end up with Madison. Powell even brought rom-com energy to Twistersthough it was still, you know, a movie about tornadoes, and he and his co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones didn't even kiss at the end, much to the dismay of basically everyone watching.
In writing Falling in Love at the MoviesI sought to draw a through-line between the old and the new in the genre. Meg Ryan didn't just emerge out of nowhere with her portrait of the “high-maintenance” Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sallyfor example. She exists in conversation with Jean Arthur in 1942's The Talk of the Townanother blonde who looks prim on the outside but has a surprisingly sexual verve.
In Powell, I see shades of Gary Cooper in Ernst Lubitsch films like Bluebeard's Eighth Wife or Design for Living. Like Cooper, who was perhaps best known for Westerns, Powell can be a cowboy, certainly, but he can also be mousey or debonair. He can do slapstick as well as stunts. And so far, he has avoided playing a superhero, a spandex prison that has kept so many charismatic stars away from romantic comedy, whether they be Jennifer Lawrence (who came closest with Silver Linings Playbook and No Hard Feelings) or Paul Rudd (with Josh from Clueless?).
As today's stars try to find their rom-com footing, nodding to and iterating on screen idols of the past, rom-coms themselves are constantly evolving. They adapt to the times during which they exist. The zany magic of the screwballs of the 1930s and 1940s eventually faded, and the 1950s brought more wistful fare, like Roman Holiday. Soon enough, that bright banner was cast out for the more edgy rom-coms of the 1970s, like Annie Hall and Harold and Maude. Then, the Ephron-Meyers model emerged in the late Eighties through the 2000s, strengthened by the Richard Curtis exports from Britain, from Four Weddings and a Funeral to Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diaryand Love Actually. All of those spawned countless imitators, who were eventually discarded in favor of the raunchy Judd Apatow model of Knocked Up.
In the 2010s, the rom-com moved largely to streaming. There was a glimmer of hope for splashy theatrical rom-coms when, in 2018, Crazy Rich Asians it was a massive, culture-dominating success. But that same year, Netflix's To All the Boys I've Loved Before exploded on social media, kicking off a run of glossy streaming rom-coms mostly centered on teenagers. Those are still popping up here and there (see: Max's recent Sweethearts), but even they have waned as Netflix has turned its attention to churning out deliberately formulaic holiday dreck in an attempt to give the Hallmark Channel a run for its money.
The rise of Powell notwithstanding, the 2020s haven't quite found their rom-com aesthetic yet. Studios have tried to ride nostalgia to the bank, reuniting stars of the halcyon Nineties like Julia Roberts and George Clooney in Ticket to Paradise or Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson in Marry Me. But those pairings end up feeling like pale imitations of what came before. So, for now, we have to settle for a bunch of rom-coms that don't really want to call themselves rom-coms: action movies where the lovers wield guns or art films like Luca Guadagnino's steamy Challengerswhich basically ends the same way as Design for Living. Both are about throuples.
The good news is that, while we wait for Hollywood to deliver the defining romantic comedy of this era, you can always watch a classic of the genre and restore your hope that the best is yet to come.
