When love again, a nice romantic comedy starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and especially Celine Dion only garnered US$5 million at the North American box office in 10 days… and less than $100,000 in Quebec, we say to ourselves that there is a problem. But which one?
love again does not make recipe, it is the least that one can say. With US$5 million in revenue from 2,703 theaters, the average of US$1,849.79 in revenue per screen is proof of a cataclysmic flop…all the more surprising given that Screen Gems studios, a subsidiary of Sony, have not skimped on the big names since even Celine Dion benefits from a good twenty minutes of screen time. So what’s going on in the land of rom.com?
They don’t weigh
The romantic comedy had its heyday in the 1990s and 2000s. Remember… When Harry Met Sally (1989 and US$92.99 million at the international box office), Hitch (1989 and US$366.78 million), Love at first sight in Notting Hill (1989 and US$363.71 million), The wedding of the year (2002 and US$374.89 million), A pretty woman (1990 and US$432.56 million) or even Mary has a je-ne-sais-quoi (1998 and 369.88 million $US)… All these films brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to the studios, for very reduced budgets.
And it’s not the stars that are missing from the credits. Kate Hudson, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Katherine Heigl, Reese Witherspoon… and even Jennifer Lawrence have made a name for themselves in rom.com.
But everything changes with the success of the superheroes. “Romantic comedies make money, but not as much as Marvel,” says Scott Meslow, author of From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (And Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy in the pages of Capsule.
“Romantic comedies largely died out for the same reason that most mid-budget movies began to die out: Hollywood favored massive blockbusters or films with statuette potential, with very little room between those two extremes” , adds the author.
Stereotypes…
Sandra Bullock, high priestess of the genre and who we saw in The lost city last year (US$192.9 million in revenue), analyzes the phenomenon in the New York Times.
“Every time someone said chick flick Or rom.com, it was discouraging. I think when everything shifted towards very masculine action adventure films, women were relegated to being sidekicks or damsels in distress.”
But Marvel’s declining dominance at the box office isn’t the only factor. Over the years, the stars having made a name for themselves with the rom.com have moved on, as have the directors. The ambient discourse has also – and above all – become less paternalistic and less stereotyped. Even a romantic comedy like How to lose your boyfriend in 10 days (2003 and US$178.50 million in revenue) with Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, considered irreverent at the time, does not pass the test of time, the portrait of the young woman appearing very old-fashioned today at the post #MeToo era.
Danielle Henderson, podcast co-host I Saw What You Did, points out, in the pages of Paradethat “no one wants to see two people who are beautiful by Hollywood standards take too long to fall in love while the planet is literally on fire.”
Long live the “zinternets”
And, of course, Netflix, Prime Video and other digital platforms have changed the game by making rom.com accessible on demand. And it’s no coincidence that You at my house and vice versa with Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher and hostage marriage starring Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel have hit Netflix in recent months.