Rom-coms return with A-list celebs after long drought for the genre

Rom-com lovers rejoice: bigger-budget, A-list led romantic comedies are making a comeback.

On Friday, The Lost City, starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum (with at least a cameo from Brad Pitt) lands in theatres across Canada. 

Bullock plays Loretta Sage, an author who writes romantic novels featuring a Fabio-esque Tatum. She ends up being kidnapped by a billionaire and has to help find a literal lost city (a nice nod to 1984's Romancing the Stone).

The film has an estimated budget of $74 million US, according to Deadline, one of many bets that streaming services and movie studios are placing on rom-coms this year. 

Julia Roberts and George Clooney's Ticket To Paradise will land in theatres this fall, while Reese Witherspoon's Your Place or Mine is in the works for Netflix later this year.

LGBTQ rom-coms with big names are also in the works. Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang leads the upcoming rom-com Fire Island (based on Pride and Prejudice), and Billy Eichner's stab at the genre, Bros, will be out this fall. 

The impressive slate of rom-coms comes after a few years of limited options. 

Marry Me launches rom-coms' comeback

"I think the death of the rom-com is actually more like the death of the mid-budget studio movie," said Scott Meslow, author of From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy. 

"You either make a $300-million movie about Spider-Man or you make a $10-million movie that might have a shot at a best picture Oscar. Rom-coms are right in the middle of the gap … I think the studios are basically trying to figure out how they can get back into rom-coms."

Marry Me, starring Jennifer Lopez, unofficially launched the 2022 return of the genre in February. The film got mixed reviews, but it made more than $49 million US worldwide (with a budget of about $23 million US, according to Deadline). 

Earlier this month, Comcast CEO and chairman Brian Roberts said the film was American streaming service Peacock's most-streamed "day-and-date movie," according to Variety.

Meslow says Marry Me wasn't the return to form he was hoping for Lopez, who has starred in some of the most beloved rom-coms of the last few decades, including The Wedding Planner and Maid in Manhattan. 

But it does signal a renewed investment in the genre from studios and audiences.

Room for smaller-budget films

Toronto-based filmmaker Faran Moradi is hoping that interest extends to smaller-budget productions as well.

His new rom-com, Tehranto, was made on a shoe-string budget and centres on the love story of two students who are part of Toronto's Iranian community.

Moradi says making a film that had aspects of romance and comedy was the most realistic way to tell this story. 

"It was just a matter of it being authentic," he said. "I feel like we're going to see more and more of that, where the rom-com genre is being reinvented a little bit, where it's kind of veering away from this fairytale kind of way of telling a story and becoming more authentic and more real."

Recent rom-coms done right

Winnipeg Free Press arts reporter Jill Wilson has been a long-time fan of the genre. She says while there haven't been a ton of new romantic-comedies capturing audiences' attention, there are a few standouts.

She points to Netflix's Always Be My Maybe (2019) as a funny standout with great chemistry between leads and co-writers Ali Wong and Randall Park.

"You genuinely believe that they have a long-term relationship and you believe in its potential, " she said. "You root for them."

Another standout for Wilson is the 2019 Rebel Wilson vehicle Isn't it Romantic. It's a smart movie that understood rom-com tropes and mined them for humour, she said.

"It's a spoof of a rom-com, and yet, they know the genre so well and they're so affectionate about it that everything about it, even though they're making fun of it, really works," said Wilson. 

For Wilson, the ingredients to a great rom-com are good chemistry, genuinely funny actors and enough architectural envy to sustain about 90 minutes of screentime. 

"Despite the fact that the word 'com' is right in there, [rom-coms] are very often not very funny. It is just sort of Three's Company level misunderstandings. I think you need to have people in it that are genuinely good comedic actors," said Wilson.

A television standout in recent years includes the BBC television series Starstruck, which is available on Crave in Canada. It has a similar premise to Marry Me but is critically celebrated as a successful modern rom-com series.

Like its successful predecessors, Starstruck knows the rom-com tropes well and plays to a sophisticated audience of people who genuinely love the genre. Creator Rose Matafeo constructs romantic, chemistry-filled moments for its leads Jessie (Matafeo) and Tom Kapoor (Nikesh Patel), while finding time for a few meaningful sub-plots for the rest of the cast.

It's also tough to deny the on-screen spark between Matafeo and Patel.

Meslow says, for him, that's the key.

"I would say the biggest thing, it really is just the two stars at the centre of [a rom-com]. You cannot get people interested in a love story if there weren't that chemistry," said Meslow. 

"It's no accident that we get Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan a few times or Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. I think it's because people realized there were some kind of hard-to-define alchemical thing happening."