When Will Gluck’s film “Anyone but You” came out two years ago, it had a pretty sluggish opening weekend over the Christmas holiday. But then, week by week, more people kept showing up. The Sydney Sweeney-Glen Powell rom-com rode positive buzz and momentum to gross more than $220 million against its $25 million budget, in large part thanks to word of mouth. That word quickly turned into a question: are rom-coms finally back?
It’s a question that seems to circulate every few months, and will likely pop up again when Gluck’s newest romantic comedy “One Night Only” hits theaters this week, given the classic feel of the film.
But if you ask the director himself, rom-coms really never died.
“What I say to people all the time, especially at the studios, is that the studios are the only ones that think that rom-coms went away,” he told TheWrap. “There’s a rom-com on Netflix or Amazon every week. There’s more rom-coms now than there ever have been before.”
“Rom-coms in theaters are what they’re actually talking about, right?” he continued. “Because rom-coms used to be in theaters. They’ve all migrated to streaming, and now in people’s mind, rom-coms are a streaming [thing]. You watch them at home.”
Do you really, though? Gluck was quick to note that, while there are plenty of great streaming options, it’s rare that anyone actually devotes their full attention to them.
“No one watches a movie at home. They multitask at home, which is totally fine,” he said. “But I want to create an an experience that you enjoy, an experience with other people. It’s not the big screen. It’s not the dark lights. In my opinion, anyway, theatricality doesn’t mean huge explosions, dark space. It means sitting next to someone, sitting next to 400 people you don’t know, and experience a monoculture for two hours.”
It’s something that Gluck has done successfully multiple times. Long before he made “Anyone but You,” he broke out in Hollywood with “Easy A” in 2010.
Starring Emma Stone as Olive Penderghast, the movie was a comedic riff on “The Scarlet Letter,” in which Olive pretends to be the school harlot in an effort to help nerdy guys seem cool. On a budget of $8 million, “Easy A” went on to earn over $75 million worldwide, and today is a beloved staple in the rom-com genre.
Immediately following that success, Gluck went on to direct “Friends With Benefits,” starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis. Again, a box office winner, notching almost $150 million worldwide against a budget of $35 million. His “Peter Rabbit” films were also box office revitalizers, the first one earning $351.5 million worldwide on a budget of $50 million.
Perhaps that’s why there was never any question that “One Night Only” would be a theatrical release for Universal (the same studio that not only made sure “Anyone but You” went to theaters, but stayed there long enough to find the success it eventually did).
“It also gives you more license to make it go bigger, and do crazier things, and have more music, and make it feel more like an event. So it was never a discussion, ever,” he said.
Indeed, “One Night Only” does do some crazy things — the premise in and of itself is arguably crazy in a modern-day setting.
The film stars Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner as Allie and Owen, who live in a world where pre-marital sex has been outlawed for three years. All citizens have a biosensor in their wrist that alerts police if anyone has broken that mandate, and the perpetrators are promptly arrested. But, for one night a year, single people are allowed to have sex with whomever they please, as many times as they want.
There’s no deep explanation of how or why this rule was instated, beyond a funny argument between Molly Ringwald and LeVar Burton’s characters about the use of Congress.
It may sound dystopian, and conceptually, it is. Don’t worry though, “One Night Only” is not here to depress you. This isn’t a rom-dram, it’s actually quite a fun ride. Gluck made sure to find that line “very carefully.”
“I did a lot, a lot of thinking about it. And there’s a lot of world-building that takes place in our movie in the background,” he explained. “I didn’t want to do the movie that this was the first year this happened. Maybe there’s a prequel that explains why this happened, so we can answer all the questions that everyone’s having on the internet, or even after they see the movie. I would love to do that.”
In fact, in early cuts of the film, the existence of the mandate wasn’t even explained. In the final version you see in theaters, there’s a quick title card explaining that it was put into effect three years ago, and laying out the basic rules. Gluck only added that after test screening audiences admitted that they were a bit lost for the first 15 minutes of the film, and struggled to come back around.
For the general purposes of “One Night Only,” the director focused on the fact that this is simply Allie and Owen’s reality, and their third time dealing with The Night. As a result, they wouldn’t be necessarily be talking about the history of it. Gluck compared discussing the mandate to how people in real life now discuss COVID, taking it as a given factor in certain stories.
By not focusing on the sci-fi elements of it, Gluck could devote the film’s attention to building the romance between Allie and Owen. Though both start the night resolved to have sex with other people, they keep running into each other, and an odd, begrudging friendship is formed (with a clear romantic tension underneath it, of course).
“When we go out on a dating app, or we meet someone on a date, we’re constructing our own narrative, who we want people to think we are,” Gluck detailed. “But after the first, second, third, fourth date, you can’t keep that up forever, and it’s who you are.”
“So when you meet someone who you are, and that person likes you for who you are, that, to me, is the strongest bond, and that’s what these two characters in ‘One Night Only’ go through, is that they have a couple kind of dark — when they’re together — dark moments that they really know who each other is, and there’s a dialogue-y, flirty banner between the two, which is not sexual. It is more, kind of, of the mind, and that’s when they really fell in love with each other.”
Naturally, Gluck took full advantage of what a theatrical release afforded him. There are big musical moments and dream sequences. It doesn’t take viewers as far as Australia, like “Anyone but You” did, but “One Night Only” makes the most of its New York setting.
Still, you’ll notice some similarities between “One Night Only” and Gluck’s other films. In fact, there’s a handful of outright easter eggs for eagle-eyed viewers to spot, including nods to “Anyone but You” and “Easy A.” And odds are, you’ll enjoy this movie just as much as his previous films in the genre.
In typical Gluck fashion, the rom-com pokes fun at rom-coms itself, right down to a cheeky meet-cute that’s quietly mocking onscreen meet-cutes in general. The director believes very strongly in acknowledging the fact that it’s never the first time a story like this is happening.
“Many characters in movies seem to have no references, and they have no idea that something like this happened before,” he lamented. “While, as we all know, everything, everything has happened a million times before.”
He took a similar tactic with 2011’s “Friends With Benefits.” In that film, Justin Timberlake’s character flat out roasts a standard rom-com, making jabs at how manipulative the soundtrack can be, how Hollywood tries to pass off other places for major cities like New York, and the ease of the love story.
“Easy A” included a quippy apology from Emma Stone’s character to Mark Twain, after real life emulates “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (it’s the moment that leads to a delightful cameo from Lalaine, for millennial fans).
Obviously, Gluck knows his way around the genre he lovingly ribs. But for the record, he didn’t set out to make so many rom-coms specifically. In fact, he says that if you were to tell his family years ago that “he’s the guy that does rom-coms, they would have laughed and laughed and laughed.”
“I like doing movies about people and their relationships and real things, and discussing real things,” he noted. “And there are very few movies, right now, that allow you to do that, that aren’t big IP movies, that aren’t superhero movies, that aren’t big epics, that aren’t horror movies.”
That’s why Gluck also tackled the “Peter Rabbit” films and 2014 remake of “Annie.” All three are about relationships — just familial ties, rather than romance. Even “Friends With Benefits” had a surprisingly emotional B-plot about family ties, as Timberlake’s character deals with his father working through the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and Mila Kunis’ character grapples with her relationship to her often absent mother.
At the moment, rom-coms are simply the vehicles letting Gluck do what he wants to do as a storyteller .
“So far they’ve let me do two of them recently, so that’s why,” he explained of his return to the genre. “It’s kind of a back door into doing what I really like to do, which is making movies about people’s relationships with each other without having them fly away and shoot lasers out of their eyes.”
Next up for the director is a project that he says “is not in a genre you ever think that I would do.”
“But if you actually look under the hood of this kind of crazy thing, it’s about people and relationships. But again, it’s this kind of Trojan horse, giving people this crazy kind of concept. And I will say it’s a period piece too.”
“One Night Only” hits theaters on Friday, Aug. 7.
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