Culture critic
It’s like everyone finally realised they’re exactly what we need – with some tweaks
I t’s been more than 10 years since Hollywood killed the romcom. Since Crazy, Stupid, Love served as the last gasp of a Great American Movie Genre. Those beautiful, glossy films may have been fluff, but they were more than just fluff – they were made unapologetically for a female audience, and often called out class and gender disparities while also being rich with the eye-candy-est eye candy of our time.
But who am I kidding... why do we need that when we have a million iterations of the same film in which caped men bash one another’s heads in for reasons so simultaneously confusing and important that they deserve sequel upon sequel, right? Like... I’m grateful to the Marvels and Top Guns of the world for propping up the film industry, sure, but can you honestly tell me you remember the plot of Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness? (I don’t even need to ask if you can quote How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days.)
The problem with having the majority of big-budget, entertainment-as-escapism films in cinemas being about (1) superheroes or (2) Tom Cruise – aside from the fact that they are largely made by, for and about men – is that they take up all the budget. The films made by, for and about women in the past 10 years haven’t got anywhere close to the same blockbuster treatment from the studios behind them.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what happened here beyond, you know, systemic sexism. But I’m going to try, starting with some insider industry stuff. Before streaming services really took off, a nearly extinct thing called the midbudget film existed. These titles, including most romcoms, provided more variety for what you could see at the cinema and helped studios make a lot of money. But I’ll admit it: the romcoms of the 2010s weren’t doing anything particularly innovative. Some of them felt straight-up regressive. (I give you Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached, which pretended to be about sexual liberation but *checks notes* ultimately reinforced outdated relationship norms.) Audiences, perhaps also bored of watching so many straight, white people fall in love, started to lose interest. So the studios started to lose money and started diverting funds into either $300million blockbusters or $10million prestige plays, says Scott Meslow, who wrote the literal book – From Hollywood With Love: The Rise And Fall (And Rise Again) Of The Romantic Comedy – on the topic.
But people still crave films that make them feel good. Honestly, we’ve been kind of desperate for them, during a stretch when we’ve witnessed politics laced with sexi
