Are great rom coms completely dead?

Wife and I both thought Anyone But You was good. Had some silly moments, but overall a good rom com

You can pretty much ask "Are great *insert any genre of films* dead?" these days.

Also, Hugh Grant is the goat rom com dude, you can't leave him off your list. He covers multiple rom com decades.

99% of Rom coms will be direct to streaming moving forward.

There's a ton of them.

Wasn’t Bros a rom com?

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Haven't seen a classic one since that decade.

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A classic rom com since the 90’s? Just off the top of my head…

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
Love Actually
Crazy, Stupid, Love
50 First Dates
40 Year Old Virgin
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Knocked Up
Bridget Jones Diary
And the GOAT Two Weeks Notice.

I agree that the 90’s was the best but the 2000’s were pretty good too.

I thought Anyone But You was pretty bad in comparison to less recent comedies. Didn't care for the leads. I admit there was one funny scene though. Didn't save the overall experience for me.

I find even stuff like Just Married to be better than Anyone But You.

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It’s even deeper about the money than that. Someone here recently posted a clip of Matt Damon talking about it. The death of DVDs has killed a revenue stream so now movies need to make more in the theaters and that’s hard for these kind of movies.

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This is a huge point that I think gets missed.

In the 80s, rentals for movies could turn a bomb into a hit or turn a hit into a massive hit and launch a franchise.

That remained with DVD rentals as well. It became very clear which movies were the reason people were going into video rental stores.

These days streaming services just lump things together; there's nothing that really prompts someone to rent a single movie anymore. If you have Disney+, for example, is it for Marvel, or classic Star Wars, or class Disney, or any of the additional items there?

The whole reason Robocop got two sequels and a reboot is because of how well the rentals did; without those it would have been relegated to an incredibly obscure Jeopardy answer.

Anyone but You was a damn good movie for what it was, but there was no reason to have the couple getting married being lesbians. There were no laughs to be had from that decision, as they went out of the way to show that everyone in the fricking movie was down with that. If you are going to have a lesbian marriage, you throw in a grandpa or old uncle that doesn't get it and get a couple of laughs out of it.

Studios straight up don’t make mid budget films anymore. This has killed multiple genres including rom coms and ensemble comedies.

Studios aren’t content with investing $40-60 million to make $80-120 million. They want to invest $400 million to make a billion. This has caused all of the resources to get tied up in big tent pole franchises and everything else shifted ti low budget streaming movies which have about as much quality as a cw show, hallmark christmas schoock, or made for tv Disney channel movie. The writing on most of these Netflix rom coms is atrocious, and the casts can barely act.

The only thing that will fix this is studios continuing to swing and miss on these big budget leviathans. In the 1960’s, studios bankrupted themselves with expensive historical epics and musicals. This led to the rebirth of storytelling cinema in the 1970’s as story and characters took the spotlight away from spectacle because they had to work with smaller budgets. Hopefully the death of these terrible tent poles will usher in another filmmaking era like the 70’s where substance over spectacle brings back the mid budget comedies.