[COLUMN] Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney Should Do Anything But Anyone But You Two | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Sony’s Anyone But You has been a surprise hit of the season. The film opened relatively modestly, to just $8m over a four-day weekend. However, over the past few months, it accrued a box office tally of over $200m. To put that in perspective, it outgrossed The Marvels, at a fraction of the cost. This box office success was driven by younger audiences. Gen Z turned out en masse to support the romantic comedy, a very loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Hollywood has responded to this success by seeking to ruthlessly franchise the film. Star Sydney Sweeney has acknowledged that she and co-star Glen Powell have already had conversations about a potential sequel to Anyone But You. Just last week, she told Jimmy Fallon that there was “a high nine chance” that the film would spawn a direct sequel. On one level, this makes sense. This is the model that Hollywood has followed for decades, trying to turn hits into potential series.

However, as appealing a potential Anyone But You Two (or just Anyone But Two) might be, this demonstrates how much these studios have forgotten about the business in which they operate. The key to building off a successful romantic comedy has rarely been a direct sequel. Romantic comedies don’t generally adhere to the same cold logic that drives the ruthless exploitation of intellectual properties like superheroes. There’s no romantic comedy franchise comparable to the Fast & Furious films.

To be fair, there have been a number of successful franchises that are adjacent to romantic comedies: the Bridget Jones films, the two Sex and the City movies, the Big Fat Greek Wedding series, the Meet the Parents trilogy. However, these tend to either skew older or aim at a broader family audience. Genre films with romantic and comedic elements may spawn sequels like Grease 2 or Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!, but Anyone But You doesn’t operate in that space.

There was generally a good reason for this. As a rule, accessible and populist narratives require conflict to drive them. In the broadest possible terms, these stories are built around something that the characters want and the obstacles that come between them. The resolution of these stories most often involves the characters overcoming these challenges and accomplishing their goals. This is true of both original films and their direct sequels.

As such, it’s fairly easy to make a sequel to an action movie. It’s very easy to swap what the characters want and the obstacles that they face, without undermining the resolution to the first film. In Beverly Hills Cop, Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) can travel to Los Angeles to solve the murder of Michael "Mikey" Tandino (James Russo) and arrest Victor Maitland (Steven Berkoff). None of this is undermined by Beverly Hills Cop 2, in which Foley chases down Maxwell Dent (Jürgen Prochnow).

In contrast, the conflict in a romantic comedy revolves around whether the leads will get together. In Anyone But You, a series of miscommunications ruins an otherwise perfect night, setting Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell) at odds. Brought together at a wedding, they pretend to be a couple so Bea can avoid her ex, Jonathan (Darren Barnet), and Ben can win back his ex, Margaret (Charlee Fraser). Inevitably, the resolution finds the two leads realizing they love each other.

It is very hard to build a sequel around that basic conflict. The romantic comedy ends with the two characters finally getting together. Since the appeal of the romantic comedy is watching the characters come together, any sequel will either have to find an entirely new angle, which is why genre hybrids like Romancing the Stone are easier to franchise, or will have to start by completely undermining the happy ending of the original film. Either approach risks alienating audiences, who want both tension between the leads and to preserve the happy ending.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways for studios to capitalize on the success of a hit romantic comedy. It just means that the traditional Hollywood sequel is not the ideal model. There were other ways to leverage breakout movies beyond just recycling a familiar name. It’s an approach that understands the title of a romantic comedy has very little to do with its appeal. It means embracing an old-fashioned idea: movie star power.

The appeal of the romantic comedy has always been anchored in the two leads. If the audience is going to watch two characters fall in love, they need to really like those characters and intuitively root for them. To be fair, some of this is rooted in the script. Many of the best romantic comedies have amazing scripts, with writers like Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond producing some of the best dialogue ever put to screen. However, there’s also something that can’t be quantified: chemistry.

This isn’t necessarily something that can be measured in spreadsheets or demonstrated through complex formulas. It isn’t even necessarily related to the inherent talent of the performer. Some actors will generate sparks with particular co-stars, but won’t share the same energy with other talent. Casting romantic comedies is difficult, and it can feel a little bit like catching lightning in a bottle. It’s hard to know what audiences will respond to until audiences have actually responded.

That’s why the way to build off a breakout romantic comedy has never involved adding a number or a colon to the title, but instead appreciating that one of the hardest parts of getting an example of the genre to work had already been done: the casting. Generally speaking, a successful romantic comedy indicates that the audience has embraced the two leads and is invested in the chemistry that they share. The movie itself is ultimately set-dressing around that.

There is some evidence that this is the case with Anyone But You. The movie itself isn’t great. It’s highly derivative, and it feels like audiences have been starved of these kinds of movies for so long that a re-heated chicken nugget tastes like steak. The reviews weren’t exactly enthusiastic. However, audiences were fascinated by the chemistry that they felt between Sweeney and Powell, to the point that both Sweeney and Powell have had to both separately deny that they had an actual affair.

So, the obvious way to take advantage of the audience’s interest in Sweeney and Powell isn’t to cast them both in a direct follow-up, but to ask audiences to follow them to a similar-but-distinct project. This was always the way these films worked. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan worked so well together that they made Joe Versus the Volcano, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail. Julia Roberts and Richard Gere bookended the 1990s with Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride.

Indeed, this approach to casting arguably outlasted the romantic comedy’s box office dominance. Emma Stone paired off with Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love., Gangster Squad, and La La Land. More than a decade after Titanic, the reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet helped Revolutionary Road feel like an event. More than most other genres, the romantic comedy exists in conversation with audiences, and is built around star personas.

This is most obvious with Julia Roberts, “a queen of the rom-com genre.” During the 1990s, Roberts was embroiled in a tabloid scandal when she abandoned Keifer Sutherland at the altar to jet off with his best friend, Jason Patric. Rather than steer away from this baggage, Roberts’ run of late ’90s romantic comedies played with this image, casting her as a Hollywood star in Notting Hill, a wedding saboteur in My Best Friend’s Wedding, and a serial fugitive from commitment in Runaway Bride.

Hollywood has changed a great deal in the decades since Roberts ruled the box office. Sweeney and Powell know this better than most. Sweeney has talked openly about how, despite being massively famous and prolific, she doesn’t have enough money to start a family. This may explain why her social media, like so many of stars of her generation, is so full of endorsements. With his natural charisma, Powell should be a movie-star by now, but most of his movies have been lost on streaming.

This problem is cyclical. As many have noted, the romantic comedy has been largely relegated to streaming, where services like Netflix are ruthlessly franchising low-budget hits like The Kissing Booth. As a result, the actors starring in them don’t get the chance to break out. Powell was delightful in the Netflix rom-com Set It Up, and it’s a crime that it has taken studios this long to realize that he should be leading projects like this instead of just supporting Tom Cruise.

At a time when the older intellectual properties seem to be faltering and when even the industry has acknowledged the existence of “superhero fatigue”, the success of Anyone But You offers studios a potential lifeline. It gives them the opportunity to return to a much steadier and stabler form of film production. After all, even allowing for salary bumps for Powell and Sweeney, romantic comedies are still far cheaper than summer blockbusters and so are much easier to justify financially.

Anyone But You resonated with a young audience that Hollywood has struggled to reach in recent years. More than that, it demonstrated that this younger audience was hungry for two concepts that the studios had long written off as dead, the romantic comedy and the movie star. The worst thing that Hollywood could do for these excited new audience members would be serve them a lame and reheated sequel to a movie that they embraced so enthusiastically.

After all, Hollywood no longer really has a pipeline to get younger audiences into the habit of going to the cinema. 1999 is rightly regarded as one of the best heard in the history of cinema, and it’s notable that a quarter of a century ago studios were releasing movies aimed at teenagers to draw them to screens. This was the year of The Matrix and The Sixth Sense, but it was also the year of Varsity Blues, She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Cruel Intentions.

There are any number of interesting things that Sony could do with Powell and Sweeney. They could lean into the Shakespeare of it all, and do another loose adaptation of one of his romantic plays: The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and so on. Alternatively, they could embrace the old-fashioned gossip of it all, and cast Powell and Sweeney as actors who the press believe have fallen in love on a film set. Naturally, they inevitably fall in love for real.

If everybody involved plays their cards right, this could be the start of something wonderful. In contrast, a direct sequel to Anyone But You would be much ado about nothing.