The all-time highest-grossing domestic romantic comedy hit the box office back in April of 2002, pulling in a staggering $241.4 million during an elongated 360-day theatrical release, the little engine that could (and did, for nearly a year). My Big Fat Greek Wedding beat out films starring box-office draws like Will Smith, Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts, and Sandra Bullock to take the crown, and its box-office total is still so high (No. 2 on the list, What Women Want, only made $182.8 million) that it threatens to never be dethroned.
Even in the early aughts, romantic comedies were Hollywood, which made the utter domination of My Big Fat Greek Wedding seem both sudden and stunning. But what might have looked like an outlier in 2002 was instead a harbinger of things to come, as the romantic comedy no longer belongs to the studio system—it’s gone indie, and it’s threatening to stay that way.
August alone has seen the release of several classic rom-coms—or, at least, romances, propelled largely by the appeal of their stars—made on an indie budget. There’s What If, a very traditional and very funny rom-com starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan; the twisty and romantic The One I Love (starring Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss); the zombie-tinged Life After Beth (with Aubrey Plaza and Dane DeHaan); and the bittersweet Love is Strange, which allows Alfred Molina and John Lithgow to play something neither veteran actor has done much of on-screen: romance.
Michael Dowse, director of What If, crafted his film both because he loves the genre and because he recognized that these films just weren’t getting made anymore, at least by major studios. “I think, partly, the genre at a studio level just played itself out a few years ago, there was [a] tipping point, that might or might not have involved Katherine Heigl, that we haven’t recovered from,” Dowse says.
Romantic comedies have always been a staple of the box office, mostly bolstered by recognizable and repeated pairings dating all the way back to the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn cinematic era (as it turns out, sassy bickering has always been in style when it comes to rom-coms). The modern era of romantic comedies (the early 90s to the mid-aughts, a 15-year period that saw the release of most of the genre’s biggest earners and most beloved films) was no different, punctuated by endearing and enduring new classics like Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, Pretty Woman, and 50 First Dates, all of which centered on stars that audiences have come to love seeing together (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler).
The genre’s success has never been dependent on fresh storytelling or bold ideas, but the romantic chemistry of its leads. If the romance itself, the spark and fizz and dazzle of it all, was believable, the film could be too, no matter how silly its premise may sound on paper. The classic pairings that made these features work, particularly Hanks and Ryan and even Sandler and Barrymore, have proven hard to replicate in recent years. Poor matchups that seem wholly invented in a boardroom somewhere (Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore’s flaccid Music and Lyrics is perhaps the best example) briefly dominated, before threatening to sink the whole enterprise.
Starlets who made a play for the rom-com throne in the 2000s, like Reese Witherspoon and Amy Adams, have largely abandoned the genre. Kate Hudson and Katherine Heigl both made sizable runs at dominating the rom-com world before fizzling out as appealing stars. Ryan Reynolds, Josh Duhamel, James Marsden, and even Ryan Gosling have all made successful attempts, but none have rom-coms in the works, and both Duhamel and Marsden have turned to Nicholas Sparks’s brand of romantic drama in recent years.
By the summer of 2011, when Sony tried to make the traditional romantic comedy work in the guise of the Justin Timberlake– and Mila Kunis–starring Friends with Benefits, the studio-produced rom-com looked like it was a goner. Even Timberlake, who charmed in the otherwise dismal feature, has abandoned rom-coms for harder fare. Kunis has similarly moved on to more ambitious features like Jupiter Ascending.
The genre itself certainly isn’t dead—even a brief perusal of the Web site Box Office Mojo turns up 15 2014 releases that are ostensibly classified as “romantic comedies,” but it’s no longer the playground of big studios looking to make some money by tossing together two bankable stars and calling it a day. That model just doesn’t work anymore. Instead, it’s independent films that, like their Big Fat forerunner, latch on to humor and romance (and fresh talents) in order to tell a charming story that doesn’t need a massive budget (or robots or explosions or space travel) to strike a chord with audiences.
Financially, it just makes sense. Dowse shares, “Romantic comedies are relatively inexpensive to make, two people talking in rooms, walking in parks. . . . The genre lends itself to the smaller budgets of independent film.”
Romantic comedies that initially premiered on the film-festival circuit are becoming far more common—this year’s indie darling Obvious Child bowed at Sundance in January, and this month’s What If, The One I Love, Life After Beth, and Love Is Strange all had film-festival debuts. Debuting at Sundance on its way to a $60 million global gross, (500) Days of Summer set a template for a modern, independently produced rom-com that can launch careers and make a bank, with a relatively tiny investment in production.
When studios make rom-coms these days, they are either aimed at black audiences—the Best Man franchise is readying a third entry, and About Last Night and Think Like a Man were both profitable and well received—or come with some added bonus to draw in audiences. Like anything else at major studios these days, it’s all about the built-in audience (see adaptations of best-selling and beloved Y.A. novels such as The Fault in Our Stars, If I Stay, the Divergent series, the Twilight series, and even the Hunger Games franchise) or the added pizazz of another genre. Judd Apatow’s run of comedies all dive into romantic elements, including Nicholas Stoller–directed fare like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five-Year Engagement, but the romance always plays second fiddle to the humor, and the female leads are never the main draw (their chemistry with their male co-stars isn’t either). Even director Richard Curtis, who gave us the best example of the multi-story-line rom-com with his charming Love Actually, tossed time travel and father-son drama into last year’s About Time. Nancy Meyers, queen of the late-in-life love story, hasn’t made a new film since 2009’s It’s Complicated, and her latest, the currently filming The Intern, is about a platonic friendship between characters played by Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro.
There are a few signs of life for traditional romances among the big players. Lionsgate is distributing Christian Ditter’s Love, Rosie, a traditional romantic comedy about lifelong pals who fall in love, and Ditter’s next film, How to Be Single, is produced by Drew Barrymore and will be distributed by Warner Bros., with Alison Brie and Lily Collins on board. The next great studio hope is Cameron Crowe’s untitled feature, starring Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, and Bradley Cooper, a romantic comedy with an adventurous edge that will arrive in May of next year. Dowse concedes that even the studio system isn’t done with rom-coms, saying, “As soon as one of these independent romantic comedies makes buckets of money, it will grab the studios’ attention again. It’s all very cyclical, if it’s worked in the past, it will work again.”
But while the studio system is only showing scant interest in bringing back traditional rom-coms, there’s plenty to get excited about in the coming months in the indie arena. Titles like the Alison Brie–starring No Stranger Than Love (about a girl whose living-room floor opens into a giant hole, and then she also falls in love, that old story), the Sam Rockwell– and Anna Kendrick–starring Mr. Right (a romantic comedy with plenty of action that also makes use of great casting), and Matt Bissonnette’s The Divorce Party (about a jilted dude who takes up with his ex-wedding planner) are all being produced without big studio backing (or a marquee rom-com name) and are likely to turn up on the festival circuit before making their way to a multiplex near you.
Is going indie the best way to big heart? When it comes to falling in love on the big screen, it just might be.
