The Romantic Comedy Came Back Because Everything Else Got Heavier

Somewhere between How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018), the American romantic comedy effectively stopped being produced. The reasons were well-rehearsed at the time. The mid-budget studio comedy had collapsed as a commercial category. Streaming absorbed the talent that would have carried the form. The specific casting economy that had supported Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant, and Matthew McConaughey in the 1990s and early 2000s had been redirected into superhero films and prestige dramas. For roughly a decade, there were almost no rom-coms being released theatrically. The form survived in Hallmark territory and in Netflix’s lower-budget streaming output, but as theatrical product it was gone.

Then, across roughly two years (late 2023 through 2025), the form reappeared. Anyone But You (2023, $220 million worldwide on a $25 million budget). Anyone But You was followed by No Hard Feelings, Players, Upgraded, and the international returns of the form at adjacent budget scales. Past Lives (2023), Challengers (2024), and Materialists (2025) occupy an adjacent territory that is not strictly rom-com but borrows the form’s emotional grammar. The revival is commercially real, and it is not coincidence.

I want to argue that the revival is explained, substantially, by what happened to the rest of the cinema around it.

The surrounding cinema got heavier

For most of the 2010s, the dominant theatrical categories were the superhero film, the animated franchise sequel, and the prestige drama. Each of these categories became heavier across the decade. Superhero films went from the relatively breezy tone of the early MCU to the grief-laden register of the later Marvel and DC productions. Animated family films added emotional density (Inside Out, Coco, Soul, Turning Red). Prestige drama, as the grief cohort I have discussed elsewhere emerged, specifically concerned itself with loss, trauma, and the slow work of processing them.

The result, by roughly 2022, was that a moviegoer choosing among the theatrically available options was choosing between variously difficult emotional experiences. The lightness that was once available in the mid-budget studio comedy had evaporated. There was, in the theatrical marketplace, almost no option for a film that was specifically charming, specifically romantic, specifically willing to end happily.

The rom-com’s return occupies exactly that vacated slot. Anyone But You is not a better film than Killers of the Flower Moon. It is, specifically, a different register. Audiences who would not have chosen between these two films in 1998 (because both were available in the theatrical marketplace every week) were, by 2023, choosing between them as the two ends of the available emotional register.

What the new rom-coms are doing

The 2024-25 rom-coms are not, in my reading, reconstructions of the 1998 Meg Ryan form. They are doing something slightly different, and the difference is legible.

Anyone But You is, mechanically, a Shakespeare adaptation (Much Ado About Nothing) structured as beach-destination-comedy and marketed on the chemistry of Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. The film acknowledges that it is a rom-com, that the viewer knows the beats, that the genre conventions are in play. It does not try to hide the form. It delivers the form confidently, with contemporary-register comedy and contemporary sexual frankness. The film is self-aware without being ironic about the genre. This is new. The 1998 rom-com did not require awareness of its own conventions in this way.

Challengers is not a rom-com in structural terms, but it is an adjacent development. Luca Guadagnino made a three-handed erotic drama that used tennis as the specific athletic and emotional geometry through which romantic triangles could be played out. The film was marketed on chemistry between Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, on sexual register, on the specific charisma-as-plot engine that the rom-com requires. It is closer to a 1940s screwball in its emotional architecture than to anything from the intervening decades.

Past Lives and Materialists belong to Celine Song’s specific project, which is using the romantic-drama idiom (not rom-com, strictly, but adjacent) to stage questions about adulthood, commitment, and the specific paths not taken. The films are quieter than the broader rom-com revival, but they are part of the same commercial window. Audiences willing to watch Anyone But You in December 2023 were the audiences willing to watch Past Lives that same year.

What made the return commercially viable

The rom-com’s return was not an accident of programming. Specific commercial conditions changed.

Mid-budget economics reopened, selectively. A $25 million film that opens to $10 million and plays for eight weeks to gross $120 million worldwide is, for the first time in roughly a decade, a commercially viable proposition again. The streaming-era atomisation of the theatrical window, which eliminated most mid-budget production, has reopened slightly for films that can generate specific date-night demand. The rom-com, with its built-in paired-attendance audience, fits this newly-viable slot.

Casting chemistry became a marketable asset again. For most of the 2010s, the dominant marketing story for a theatrical film was the intellectual property: the franchise, the comic-book source, the previous film in the series. Star chemistry was a secondary consideration. Across 2023-25, studios relearned that the specific chemistry between two leads could drive opening-weekend box office independently of IP. Anyone But You was sold on Sweeney and Powell. Challengers was sold on Zendaya, O’Connor, and Faist. Materialists was sold on Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal. The casting-as-selling-point economy, dormant for a decade, has been reawakened.

The adult audience came back. The audience that would have supported the 1998 rom-com did not die; it aged. Across 2023-25, specific demographic data indicate that adult moviegoers (specifically the 25-to-54 segment) have returned to theatrical attendance at rates not seen since before the pandemic. The return is uneven (they will go for specific films, not for anything), but the audience exists again, and the rom-com is one of the specific film categories they are willing to show up for.

Why it might not last

I should be careful. The rom-com revival is three years old. It is not yet a durable commercial trend. Several things could break it.

The oversupply problem: if studios respond to the 2023-25 successes by greenlighting fifteen rom-coms for 2026-27, most of them will be bad, and the form will be back in the 2012-2022 reputation spiral within two cycles.

The casting problem: the current rom-com revival depends on a small number of specific actor pairings that can open a film. If those actors age out of the age-range the form requires, or if they move into other genres, the pipeline narrows.

The script problem: the 2024-25 rom-coms are, on average, not as well-written as the 1998 rom-coms. The specific screenplay craft that Nora Ephron and Richard Curtis and their peers brought to the form has not, so far, found its contemporary equivalents. The form can survive without that craft for a cycle or two. It cannot survive indefinitely.

What I am hoping for

I want the rom-com to stabilise as a theatrical category. I want two or three of them per year, made at specific budgets, with specific casting, released in date-night windows. I want the screenwriters who can write the form at Ephron-and-Curtis level to emerge, which will require the commercial infrastructure to support their development.

The 2023-25 window has demonstrated that the audience is there. The question is whether the industry can sustain the infrastructure to meet the demand. The rom-com, as a form, went away because the industry stopped making it. It is coming back because the industry has started making it again. Whether it stays depends on whether the current return is treated as a revival or as a gold rush.

Watch what gets greenlit for 2026-27 release. The answer will be visible within eighteen months.