"Anyone But You" Signals a Quiet Sea Change
The Sydney Sweeney-Glen Powell Rom Com Passed $200 Million at the Box Office. That's significant.
In 1981, Paramount Pictures financed a Hollywood experiment.
As recounted to the New York Times in 1983, in the early 1980s the the bottom was falling out from big-budget Hollywood productions. In response, Michael Eisner commissioned seven low-budget films with budgets between $4 and $8 million - referred to as “The Magnificent Seven.”
Five of these films were flops or never made it to theaters, while one film did fairly well. The seventh film, An Officer and a Gentleman, was a phenomenon - grossing $130 million in the US on a $6-7 million budget. The film made stars out of Richard Gere and Debra Winger, won Louis Gossett Jr. an Oscar, and was one of the signature romantic dramas of the ‘80s. It also made Paramount their money back on all of the “Magnificent Seven” films.
Greenlighting a film is always a gamble, and studios have always tried to minimize their risk by betting on proven formulas. In recent years, Hollywood has followed Disney’s lead by focusing exclusively on brands and IP - consequently shrinking the market. Where there used to be a diversity of films - including mid-budget star-driven comedies and dramas - the multiplexes now seem to be populated exclusively with sequels and superheroes. These films command huge price tags and marketing budgets, but have a better chance of landing on the year-end list of billion-dollar earners.
For a stretch, SFX-packed tentpoles budgeted at $200 million-plus delivered reliable returns - even record-breaking ones. But superhero fatigue - long foretold - has finally started to set in with the box office meltdowns of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, and Madame Web. And once-reliable franchises - Fast and Furious, Mission: Impossible, Indiana Jones - are rapidly losing steam. If 2024 wasn’t already a year for studios to restack the deck due to the effects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes in ‘23, the waning interest in studio product would be a full-on industry crisis.
Clearly, something has to change.
Oppenheimer over the summer served as a trial balloon for the audience’s evolving appetites. It’s true that the film, a three-hour drama about the father of the atomic bomb, had an all-star cast and Christopher Nolan’s name in the credits. However, the film exceeded expectations - to the tune of $960 million and counting at the box office. To date, it is Nolan’s highest-grossing film that doesn’t star Batman.
Oppenheimer proved that audiences were willing to accept more heady material. Recently, a late-December release also reaffirmed the need for lighter fare.
Anyone But You, a romantic comedy starring rising stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, has officially crossed $200 million dollars worldwide on a $25 million budget. And in a truly wild stat, it’s become the highest-grossing Shakespeare adaptation ever (being very loosely based on “Much Ado About Nothing”).
Sure, both Sweeney and Powell are Gen Z favorites (and a possible offscreen romance has been teased), but stars with larger Instagram followings have failed to open movies before. What the success of Anyone But You really means is that a genre that had been mostly been benched on streaming - the romantic comedy - can continue to survive on the big screen. When the star appeal is right, couples can be motivated to drive to a theater for date night instead of sitting on the couch and scrolling through Netflix.
What makes Oppenheimer and Anyone But You anomalies in the current market? First of all, they’re made for adults - both carry R ratings. But they’re also throwbacks. Oppenheimer has the shape of classic WWII dramas, but with a cerebral Nolan twist (and has a more complicated take on the American war effort). Anyone But You is a return to an important rite of passage for movie stars in the ‘90s and ‘00s - the romantic comedy.
Anyone But You is also reminiscent of “the Magnificent Seven” experiment, and the way that business used to be done in Hollywood. Rather than making one massive bet, studios used to throw a diverse film slate at the wall (of comedies, dramas, B-pictures, and epics) and see what sticks. The cultural zeitgeist is hard to pinpoint - and what tech companies don’t understand is that no algorithm can account for audience taste. It’s why despite using defined audience “taste clusters” to greenlight content, Netflix continues to cancel so many of its big-budget bets (it takes a lot of misses to add up to one Stranger Things or Squid Game).
Anyone But You was far from a sure thing when announced. The December release date for a sunny date movie was a head-scratcher, especially when Valentine’s Day was right around the corner. Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell were recognizable from Euphoria and Top Gun: Maverick, but had never been top-billed for theatrical film before. However, the film was low-risk and low-cost for Sony. Despite releasing Madame Web, the company seem to be embracing the unknown element in theatrical as the only major studio without a streaming service (the Jennifer Lawrence raunch-com No Hard Feelings, which made $87 million in June but truly popped on Netflix, is something of a forerunner to Anyone But You).
Hollywood is addicted to taking the wrong lessons from success. Barbie was a hit? It must mean there’s a hunger for Mattel IP! Anyone But You was a success? Let’s run it back again with the same star pairing. I groan aloud whenever I hear any news about Max’s upcoming Harry Potter series, as WB tries to wring the last juice out of a property that will turn 30 in 2027. The nostalgia is growing stale, and audiences are getting wise to remakes and retreads.
The pessimist in me says that the major studios will continue to launder IP until they can merge into one mutant mega-corp. But I hold some optimism that we are on the verge of a new era for filmmaking.
When studios get desperate, that’s often when the most exciting work occurs.
In the ‘60s, on the heels of flopping large-scale musicals and Biblical epics, Hollywood pulled off a pivot. Recognizing how a young audience responded to films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, studios handed the keys to the kingdom to the auteurs of the ‘70s - among them Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, De Palama, and Scorsese. In the ‘90s, the independent film market was hot with talents such as Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino.
The Gen Z heir-apparent to those directors will come from a studio taking a flyer on an untested filmmaker. Anyone But You is not the film that will launch this movement, but it suggests the window is opening for mid-budget filmmaking to return. Imagine if the success of Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell today paid for the next great American film tomorrow? Stranger things have happened…