When you cast a couple with the chemistry Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell have in Anyone But You, we’ll watch it.
As the resident romantic comedy lover, I have to admit the genre has been tough in the last decade. It’s rare that we get big budget rom coms coming to theaters like back in the 1990s and 2000s. Rather than a summer full of 13 Going on 30 or Mean Girls or Love Actually (2004 really was a killer year), we get maybe one studio romantic comedy per year if we’re lucky.
To be clear, I’m not downplaying the awesomeness of straight-to-streaming love fests. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m still obsessed with Netflix’s Happiness for Beginners. But where are the Meg Ryans and Tom Hanks? Where’s the big red carpet fanfare? Luckily we got a studio rom com toward the tail-end of 2023 that may just reignite the genre. Best of all, it just released on Netflix.
We’re talking about Anyone But You, the Shakespeare-inspired romantic comedy starring Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria) and Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick). After a sweet night together following the most adorable coffee shop meet cute, Bea and Ben fall victim to the classic misunderstanding–a rom com staple–turning them from budding lovers to mortal enemies. But they can’t just ignore each other, because they’re both invited to the same wedding.
Anyone But You has everything that’s been missing from the genre.
It’s been a long time since a romantic comedy came out that followed the formula while still feeling fresh. You can thank the indie rom com trend for that, choosing ambiguous or sad endings over the eternally optimistic happy endings that the genre was originally known for. You could no longer be certain that the couple would end up together in the end, a stressor few of us need right now. Luckily Anyone But You is much more like the romantic comedies that came before it.
Want to watch two hot people with undeniable chemistry fall in love? Want to live vicariously through impossibly rich people as they spend their days in a mansion on the Australian coast? Want to simultaneously throttle the couple for not being honest with their feelings, but also want to be them, stat? That’s Anyone But You for you. Could all of the couple’s problems be solved just by speaking honestly with each other? Sure, but if every movie did that, every film would be about one minute long.
Money talks, and Anyone But You might have proved to execs that the genre isn’t dead.
Maybe we can blame the Marvel cinematic universe for the extreme lack of romantic comedies. Studios thought people only cared about superheroes or remakes of their favorite movies from childhood. Unfortunately, money talks. Luckily, Anyone But You was a box office success. It earned over $216 million globally, which is almost ten times what they spent making it. Add in the fact that it has earned a Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 87% and that might be a good sign that we’ll be having a rom com renaissance. (Fingers crossed.)
Catch Anyone But You on Netflix
You can now stream Anyone But You on Netflix.
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