This article is a preview from the Autumn 2019 edition of New Humanist
For me, it all began with Lucy Liu, standing in the doorway of a fancy Manhattan office late at night, demanding that her exhausted assistant order her “that thing that I like, from that place with the gay waiter, the closeted one”, before disappearing back to her desk with a perfectly executed ponytail swish. Ninety seconds into the 2018 Netflix original film Set It Up, this moment established Liu’s character as an overweening, overworked boss with a secretly tragic personal life and a gift for fast-paced repartee – in other words, a romantic comedy heroine in dire need of a hero.
The film was released onto the subscription streaming platform as part of what Netflix branded the “Summer of Love”, a season of new films and adaptations that celebrated the humorous side of romance. Alongside Liu’s efforts with Taye Diggs in Set It Up, other highlights that were part of the promotion included To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (a sweet teen romance about awkward crushes) and Irreplaceable You, a tearjerker about a woman dying of cancer who tries to set her fiancé up with his next partner before she dies.
Critics had mixed feelings, but viewers were enthusiastic. Recommendations spread by word of mouth, via online opeds, social media and podcasts. According to a Netflix company report, over 80 million subscribers watched at least one film from its slate of romantic comedies.
Later the same summer, a globetrotting comedy called Crazy Rich Asians set the American movie industry abuzz by grossing over $230 million from a modest budget of just $30 million. The film received a lot of positive coverage as the first film from a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Asian descent in 25 years. It picked up a slew of award nominations. It was hailed as a major step forward for onscreen ethnic representation, and two
sequels were quickly put into development.
Suddenly, the romantic comedy was back in favour. Dana Fox, who had penned a number of commercially successful films in this genre in the early 2000s including The Wedding Date, reported that two weeks after Liu’s pony tail flick in Set It Up appeared on Netflix, studios executives were calling her about dusting off long-ago-rejected romcom scripts. Now, further instalments are already in the works for To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before and several other 2018 hits. The audience had spoken: the romcom drought years were over.
The reason why romantic comedies faded from our screens in the first place is a straightforward case of cause and effect: the films decreased in quality, so people got tired of them. From the glory days of the 1990s, when iconic films like Clueless, You’ve Got Mail and Four Weddings and a Funeral not only raked in the box-office receipts but also reshaped pop culture’s concept of love, we descended to the derivative offerings of the early 2000s like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Failure to Launch. The same actors appeared over and over again: Adam Sandler, Katharine Heigl, a post-Friends Jennifer Aniston, plus pre-Oscar-winning incarnations of Matthew McConaughey and Colin Firth.
Nora Ephron, the writer and director who probably did more than anyone else to create the language of the romcom – that fast-paced, rat-a-tat style of dialogue which is simultaneously intimate and emotionally unavailable – was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 and only made one more film before her death in 2012 – Julie and Julia, which isn’t a romcom at all. Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally is arguably the greatest practitioner of Ephron’s style, his character’s self-loathing and insecurity palpable in every cleverly constructed, arrogant line. Compared to that, Sandler’s banal drawl was never going to measure up.
Always capricious, Hollywood executives interpreted the fall-off in returns for romantic comedies as being an indictment of the genre itself, rather than these lacklustre examples of it. At the same time, the craze for blockbuster superhero films was just beginning. Iron Man, the first instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was released in 2008 and made half a billion dollars.
Big-budget franchises like this made much more commercial sense, with their legions of fans and potential for endless spin-offs and merchandise. Why bother with mid-budget movies about a magazine editor who maybe finds love and learns about herself along the way which might flop completely, when Iron Man 3 was laughing all the way to the bank?
But a lot changed in that fallow period for romcoms, once Meg Ryan had hung up her perm and Colin Firth’s damp white shirt had dried out. A new era of technology had dawned, with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime now deluging viewers with choice. With better data about what people actually viewed and when, these companies could see that romantic comedy films were far from dead. In a time of political upheaval and horror, their subscribers were actively seeking out the reassuring certainty of a happy ever after.
It’s no accident either that many of the new romcom hits are films with more diverse casts than their predecessors of the early 2000s, where only white, heterosexual couples ever seemed to walk off into the sunset. This was a major talking point around Crazy Rich Asians, but it’s actually what a lot of these new romcoms have in common.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is about a Korean-American teen finding love, but Jenny Han, author of the original book of the same name, said that it was a real struggle to find film makers who were willing to keep her original protagonist, rather than replace her with a white version – which is how the film ended up on Netflix, rather than in cinemas with a major studio. Lucy Liu was 49 when Set It Up came out, and part of that film’s appeal was how incredibly rare it was to see a woman of her age and ethnicity (she’s Chinese-American) play a comic character who also talks about sex.
There are romcoms slated for release in summer 2019 about disabled characters, about young gay men, about polyamorous people. Suddenly, romance on screen has begun to reflect the infinite variety and complexity of love in real life, and unsurprisingly viewers are far more interested in it than they were in the remote, stale fairytales of the previous decade. Indeed, so far has the romcom come that in June 2019 an entire film festival was devoted to it in Los Angeles – the first event of its kind. The founder, Miraya Berke, said that she wanted romcom fans to have a space in which to love their films, just as sci fi, superhero and comics fans do.
The return of the romcom is about money, because everything in entertainment always is: a kind of film that was failing to bring in cash is now doing that again, so it’s once more a desirable thing for studios to make. But behind that there’s a subtle shift, an acknowledgement that the balance of power between Hollywood executives and the humble viewer has changed. There is so much out there to watch that just being released is no longer any guarantee of success for a film.
Viewers can and indeed do vote with their eyes and their wallets on what they want to see more of. We understand now how the game is played. In the run-up to the release of Crazy Rich Asians, for instance, I saw several social media campaigns about how important it was, if diversity and representation mattered to you, to go and see the film in a cinema on its opening weekend. The power to decide what appears on our screens next no longer resides just in a handful of LA offices, but with you, every time you make the decision about what to click on next. And so far, what we’ve clicked on is happily ever afters.
