Where Have All The Rom-Com Blockbusters Gone?

This week, I watched the Priyanka Chopra Jonas-led rom-com Love Again ($2.7M worldwide) in theaters. My theater was mostly empty. Perhaps for good reason, because it was the most run-of-the-mill, check-the-boxes-romantic comedy I have seen in a while: he’s a struggling writer, she has a dead boyfriend she can’t get over, they have their “I can’t believe you lied to me” moment right after she spends the first night with him, they even have their final kiss with generic music and a spinning camera (think the fake movie score Jack Black’s character is working on in The Holiday).

The movie was sleepy and lazy. I was looking for an angle to write a think piece for Wallflower on, but I couldn’t because there was just nothing there.

On one level, Love Again served its purpose as a functional guilty pleasure for me. Yes, it was terrible but I still kind of enjoyed it, mainly because it’s so rare to see any traditional or even formulaic rom-com or romantic dramas in theaters.

Why is that? Where are the movies like Hitch ($371M worldwide), Sweet Home Alabama ($180M worldwide), or 27 Dresses ($172M worldwide) for the 2020s? Pre-streaming days, those two genres used to crush at the box office. Titanic ($2.2B worldwide), a romantic drama, held the record for the biggest box office haul of all time for 12 years. Now, the romantic comedy and even romantic drama offering at the cinema is a desert. 

There are streaming shows aimed at women like Bridgerton that blow up, though these usually are more of the bodice-ripping, bedroom dramas that don’t float my boat.

So what happened to these genres? Here are my theories:

Theory 01 | The death of malls

Women still make a majority of the purchasing decisions in the home. But unlike 15 to 20 years ago, we aren’t doing a weekly trip to the mall and maybe catching a movie as part of our shop, we’re racking up Amazon reward points.

We shop more from home and there are way more movies now on demand, so why not watch more movies from home? Movies aimed at women in their twenties and thirties may just be riskier nowadays.

Theory 02 | The juggernauts aren’t the romances

Superhero movies, love them or hate them, are the type of movie you really want to see in the best type of theater. They have great visual effects, larger-than-life scenery, and epic chase and fight scenes.

On the whole, though, romance is lower down on the plotline list for these movies. The couples rarely stay together for more than one film, if they have a romantic plot line at all. Hollywood has adopted a more all or nothing strategy. They risk more on their multi-million dollar franchises than on the mid-size fare.

Theory 03 | We’ve stopped believing in Santa

One of my friends has a theory that rom-coms aren’t selling because people stopped believing in the love stories they are selling. Our experiences of love don’t match up with the sugary, leave-the-good-guy-for-the-right guy fantasies we consumed as teens. Maybe we stopped watching the Santa romances because we figured out they weren’t real. That seems reasonable.

Theory 04 | Producers are just missing a market

When you walk into Macy’s, it’s easy to get what you want. There’s a section for men. There’s a section for women (several). There’s a section for teens. And one for kids.

We see the guys’ movies hit theaters every month. We see the kids’ movies hit theaters. We don’t see a lot of primarily women’s movies hit theaters anymore. It’s possible that producers just stopped differentiating the market as well as department stores do, for one reason or another, and now we have multiplexes with no women’s section.

If this is the case, there might be a huge hole for romantic comedies and romantic dramas (quality ones) at the theaters. They may just be waiting for the right writers to come along.

In short…

I honestly hope that the most correct theory is the fourth one because that’s the most solvable. As a movie aficionado, I want to have more choices for movies that are right up my alley than what is currently served to me at the theater. I hope I’m not alone because I miss those good, classic rom-coms and for now, I’m stuck with duds like Love Again.