What Ever Happened to the Romantic Comedy?

A great many have remarked the decline of that old box office stalwart, the big-screen Hollywood romantic comedy, over the years. And many have proffered explanations--some more plausible than others, but all of those with which I am familiar missing important facets of the matter.

What seems to me really important here is that the genre, which originated in the day of Ernst Lubitsch, was fairly well-worn by the '90s, and perhaps too much a hothouse flower for this later period--the genre emerging in an era which, in actual life, was not so different from any other period, our own included, in the critical areas, but where on the screen, at least, a certain delicacy, a certain portrayal of innocence, was plausible; in which the rhythms of filmmaking were different, often slower and gentler. Such a genre, while not necessarily unsophisticated (in the view of some, at its best a good deal more sophisticated than anything we would get later), was a poor fit with '90s irony, and '90s crudity, and '90s cinematic technique, which already well into the age of high concept was characterized by the short takes and close shots that have gone with the music video-izing, or action movie-izing, of all of cinema--hardly the thing for a film about two people discovering and dealing with their feelings for each other. Consistent with all this it seems significant that the most celebrated romantic comedy of that decade was Sleepless in Seattle--a romantic movie actually about romantic movies, at least as much as it was about the lovers at the story's center. (Indeed, Rosie O'Donnell scored the film's most memorable line when her character told the Meg Ryan character "You don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.") And following that hit the follow-up by the film's director and stars was . . . You've Got Mail, a remake of a classic directed by Lubitsch himself--The Shop Around the Corner. I recall writer-director Nora Ephron declaring proudly in some piece of publicity that "We put a computer in it!"--but putting a computer in a romantic comedy, too, had been done before. Long before. By Nora Ephron's OWN PARENTS, Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron. That movie was 1957's Desk Set. (I'm sure someone must have mentioned its existence to her, sometime.)

All of this has escalated greatly since. And as if all that were not enough, the film business was changing dramatically. The ever-onward and upward ascent of the high concept vision of filmmaking, the ever-more intense competition from content on the small screen, meant that there was ever less reason to invest in a production that did not derive some significant benefit from being seen on a large screen, or which at least could not be replicated by makers of content for the small. This was all the more the case in an era of rising budgets, with their inducement of those obliged to mind the books to think about maximizing their revenue streams from all the available sources, not least those the opportunities beckoning in a global age (as the whole ex-Communist world opened up, Asian consumers in particular got more affluent, etc.). The result was that Hollywood studios wanted movies that would travel well, and preferably series' and franchises and even universes of movies that would travel well. They wanted merchandising potential. All this was to the great advantage of the action film whose death had been so greatly exaggerated circa 1990, and the animated family movie that had likewise been so marginal for so long--and the great disadvantage of everything else, the more in as the old institution of the film star, on which they might have counted in the absence of so much else, waned.

The romantic comedy was a natural early casualty. Because it does not generally get much mileage from spectacle. Because it does not travel so well. (Being doable on a low budget, Hollywood has no natural monopoly here, while the subtleties of comedy and romance do not always transcend cultural barriers. Think of how Crazy Rich Asians was hyped as a sure winner in China and the revival of the form in America, and then completely failed to be either of those things.) Because it does not launch sequels and franchises and move lots and lots of merchandise. Meanwhile those actresses who had made careers of them moved on to other pursuits on and off the screen--a good many now concentrating on their "wellness empires."

Still, like so much else not to be seen on the big screen anymore there is plenty of romantic comedy on the small. The Hallmark Channels certainly have done well out of them--arguably helped by the fact that as prestige TV lovers glory in the dark and the "edgy," Hallmark has gone in the opposite direction, serving up cozy fare where, as much as anyone can offer it in the 2020s the requisite delicacy, innocence, rhythms are the order of the day.