Positioned between much bigger movies on the release calendar, Anyone But You has become a respectable hit for Sony. Released in the US on 22nd December and here in the UK on Boxing Day, director Will Gluck’s screwball romantic comedy has gone from a soft launch to a worldwide hit that’s made more than $100m to date.
The film stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell as Bea and Ben, two singles who can’t stand each other but decide to pretend they’re in a relationship so they can fend off and woo back their respective exes at their mutual friends’ wedding in Australia.
If that sounds like a solid, crowd-pleasing, enemies-to-lovers romcom narrative, that’s because it is. In fact, it’s one of William Shakespeare’s ones, but we’re coming to that.
Primarily, Anyone But You’s box-office success is remarkable because it had the softest of soft launches. Upon release in the US, its competition was Warner Bros’ DC sequel Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom, Illumination Animation’s Migration, and A24’s acclaimed wrestling biopic The Iron Claw. Frankly, the only list Anyone going to come first in is an alphabetical one.
It finished fourth over the four-day Christmas weekend, with a $6.3m haul that was slightly below expectations. However, all of the aforementioned competitors have fallen down the charts since then. And Anyone But You has stayed in the US box-office top 5, actually growing in its first two weeks and the maintaining short drops throughout January.
It’s a similar story in the UK. Since its £1.2 million opening weekend, the film earned similar figures every week and has actually gone up in the charts. And this weekend, Variety reported that it was the first R-rated romantic comedy to cross the $100-million milestone since Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016.
So, what went right for Anyone But You, with its $25m budget, sunny setting, and really, really, ridiculously good-looking leads? What does it owe to Shakespeare and Natasha Bedingfield? And doesn’t this just go to show how romantic comedies are madly undervalued by studios?
A skirmish of wit
They didn’t market this aspect, but one of the surprises in Anyone But You is that it’s a modernisation and subversion of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Even the character names are basically Beatrice and Benedick.
Older readers may remember that Kenneth Branagh made a faithful adaptation of the play in the 1990s. And Joss Whedon made a black-and-white indie home-movie version between Avengers films in the 2010s.This one is far less a straight modernisation, but more like 10 Things I Hate About You was to The Taming Of The Shrew.
In Ilana Wolpert’s script, Beatrice becomes Bea, Benedick becomes Ben, Claudio becomes Claudia, and there are other references to the play throughout the film. These include quotes used as creative chapter headings (one intertitle has “Bait the hook well; this fish will bite” written in the sand) or as dialogue (and a nice running joke about characters shrugging that they just came up with it).
Nevertheless, the film is far from an obvious A-to-B translation. It kicks off with the root of Ben and Bea’s enmity, a textbook meet-cute that ends in a terrible misunderstanding. From there, it has a lot of fun with the pair bickering with each other, outwitting the supporting characters, and maybe (just maybe!) growing and changing together.
There’s also nudity, and sex, and a healthy serving of raunch to push it into R-rated/15-certificate territory. The usual suspects will amplify social media posts about how wrong the sex scenes in Oppenheimer were, but there’s little actual evidence that Gen-Z has turned against sex in movies en masse. It’s more likely a culture-war prop for older puritans and never-nudes with newspaper columns. Either way, it certainly doesn’t seem to have hurt this film.
Even less controversially, the film is set in modern-day Australia (it’s summer there in December) rather than Messina. Shakespeare was doing destination-wedding romcoms long before they became multiplex hits. Plus, co-writer and director Will Gluck has form for modernising English class set texts in comedy movies.
Gluck previously directed the brilliant Easy A, which draws from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and also made 2011’s Friends With Benefits (that’s the Mila Kunis one – Natalie Portman’s was No Strings Attached). This is his return to romcoms after a run of family movies including 2014’s Annie remake and the Peter Rabbit movies. Anyone But You combines Friends With Benefits’ raunchy, amiable tone with the Easy A mode of literary references.
It also has Easy A’s unerring devotion to Natasha Bedingfield’s songbook, and “Unwritten” is all over the soundtrack of this one. In another measure of the film’s success, the 2004 hit soared back into the UK Official Singles Chart top 20 this week. Sophie Ellis Bextor’s “Murder On The Dancefloor” recently enjoyed a similar bump from Saltburn, but here, there’s a very different needle-drop, culminating in a big silly cast singalong over the credits.
Release your inhibitions
Around this time last year, after the Jennifer Lopez movie Shotgun Wedding went from a summer 2022 cinema release to a January 2023 debut on Prime Video, we wrote about the state of the studio romantic comedy in the streaming age.
Read more: Shotgun Wedding and the state of the studio romantic comedy
What Anyone But You demonstrates is how a movie like this can stretch its legs in cinemas when given time. Like almost nothing else these days, it made more money on its second weekend in wide release than its first, which can only point to a word-of-mouth hit for an underserved cinema audience.
At worst, it’s a squarely three-star romcom, but how many of those have had a proper big-screen run in the last few years? Sony is the only Big Five Hollywood studio that hasn’t launched its own streaming service, and we’re sure that another studio might have dropped Anyone But You on HBO Max or Peacock or Paramount+, or even sold it to Netflix, Amazon, or Apple.
For example, we’ll next see Powell in Hit Man, a romantic comedy that he co-wrote with director Richard Linklater. The consensus of the rave festival reviews from Venice and Toronto was “see with this the biggest audience you can”. Typically, Netflix bought the distribution rights for $20 million. If they plan a theatrical release, we’ve yet to hear any concrete plans. Then again, do we ever hear their theatrical plans?
Meanwhile, Sony has scored a few hits with its cinema-exclusive policy in the last couple of years. With current windows, it will probably turn up on VOD around 14th February, to catch couples who are staying in for Valentine’s Day.
That very day, the studio is also releasing Madame Web, (which co-stars Sweeney) their first of three Marvel movies slated for cinemas in 2024. If you’re not keeping count, that’s more than Marvel Studios is releasing in the same frame.
Whatever the performance for this or Kraven The Hunter or the untitled third Venom movie, with much higher budgets and apparent diminishing returns, the strategy of making fewer, bigger movies is looking a bit hit-and-miss. Romantic comedies have become bread-and-butter for streaming services more than any other genre, but they’re obviously still pulling punters in when they get a proper cinema run.
And heck, if you need a rising star to be one of the Spider-Women in your comic-book movie, making movies like these is how you put them over. Sweeney (also an executive producer on this) and Powell are obviously on their way to movie mega-stardom and it happens they’ve stopped off on the route that launched countless stars before them.
As we’ve written before, romcoms are constantly undervalued and the conversations around hits like these always seem to be about their outlier status. As for where the genre goes after this sleeper-hit success – to quote the film’s secondary creative muse, “the rest is still unwritten”.
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