New Romantics: The Changing Ways We Consume Love Stories
Reason & Whimsy #7
Romance is dead at the movies.
Did you know that My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is opening this weekend? Did you know that there was a My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2? Did you also know that My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the highest grossing romantic comedy of all time?
The original film made $241 million at the US box office. MBFGW3 is expected to top out somewhere around $40 million, if projections are accurate, which will easily make it the biggest romantic comedy of the year (beating Book Club: The Next Chapter’s $17 million). Currently, the genre is tracking to account for .43% of total US box office in 2023, which is down from a peak of 11.4% in 1999 when Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, and the greatest-movie-of-all-time Shakespeare in Love were all big hits.
This fall is the result of a number of factors, only worth a cursory recap: the continued eventizing of cinema where only the biggest releases get any cultural oxygen; the Covid-effect of smaller budget films going straight to streaming; the proliferation of Hallmark-style holiday romances on the small screen immunizing moviegoers to the allure of the theater; the shifting economics of Hollywood encouraging big stars to bet on franchise roles with more upside; and the 1999 arrival of the perfect romantic comedy and greatest-movie-of-all-time, Shakespeare in Love, which was an origin story for the greatest love story in western civilization and automatically made any subsequent films disappointing.
But the decline of love at the cineplex might mean its rise everywhere else:
Sales of romance novels increase 52.4 percent last year, according to Publishers Weekly, as #SpicyBookTok drives escalating interest and an increasing sense of community among young readers. The recent opening of the second branch of The Ripped Bodice bookstore led people to drive hours to wait in line for the doors to open (the romance novel-specializing bookstore’s first branch opened in LA in 2016 after a Kickstarter campaign).
Streaming shows like Bridgerton, Normal People, and Outlander are recreating and mainstreaming romance novel vibes. And dating shows have become the largest sub-genre of reality TV, with Netflix launching a new one seemingly every week.
On TikTok, videos tagged #coupletok have accumulated 10.8B views, providing bite-size sequels to every rom-com ever that explore the romantic mundanity of married life after the courtship ends.
Even dating apps have turned actual romance into a media experience itself, a moment of consumption with a screen that may or may not result in a date but will at the very least be a brief diversion in a larger story.
Maybe it’s fitting that the release of Shakespeare in Love (the greatest-movie-of-all-time btw) coincided with its genre’s historical peak. Because for all that Shakespeare did to capture the experience of heartbreak, maybe it’s not something that could be captured. Love’s universality is a bug, not a feature: because we’ve all had some experience with love of some kind, its stories must be more specific to be relatable. And what we thought were universal truths about relationships were just storytelling tropes in disguise.
This is why the ascendancy of love stories across other media is fueled by a more diverse collection of voices, particularly people of color and LGBTQ+ creators, as Dodai Stewart captured in her coverage of The Ripped Bodice:
“Under the romance umbrella, there are many subgenres: historical, contemporary, young adult and much, much more. The Ripped Bodice carries all of those, and also has sections specifically for L.G.B.T.Q. romances, paranormal romances, sci-fi romances and erotica — with a diverse array of heroines and heroes: Black winery owners, Asian fitness influencers, Latina telenovela stars.”
Those voices might not serve the business interests of a broad box office hit, but they collectively appeal to a much wider audience than what Julia Roberts could in her heyday. Because while love might be all-inclusive, love stories are not, or as Billy Eichner’s character rants in last year’s gay rom-com Bros: “Love is love is love? No, it’s not. That’s bullshit. That is a lie we had to make up to convince you idiots to finally treat us fairly. Love is not love. Our relationships are different. Our sex lives are different.”
Even the lowest form of the love story genre, reality TV, is expanding the aperture of who these stories are for: The Ultimatum is the intellectual’s Temptation Island, while Too Hot To Handle is the rake’s Love Island. Are these shows still exploitative? Almost definitely. But at least they are telling more complex stories and posing bigger questions than “Who will he/she pick?”
Instead of the Shakespearean ideal, the new voices and formats that tell these post-modern love stories now demonstrate—to borrow a phrase from another reality dating show—love on a spectrum.
In the end the death of the romantic comedy and the increase in more diverse love stories in varied formats has finally delivered what Viola de Lesseps (if you’re a philistine, that’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in Shakespeare in Love) was dreaming for: “Not the artful postures of love, but love that overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love as there has never been in a play [romantic comedy].”
This Week’s Whimsies
Random diversions, curiosities, and explorations that might inspire a new thought.
Every month I am faced with a moment when I need to decide if a potential link to an Atlantic article is worth using my “one free article” for the month. Tragically this month it happened on September 1st, and I succumbed to “Retailers Bet Wrong on America’s Feelings About Stores”. It was worth it not only for the trip to the Bass Pro Shops pyramid in Memphis and this line: “If you want to sell as much stuff as possible, the internet alone will get you only so far.”
As usual Benedict Evans has some brilliant thoughts around generative AI and intellectual property. What he makes clear is that many of the questions being posed right now have been around for centuries, and we’ve barely even begun tackling the new questions.
For the last six years I have been following Twitter’s best storytelling : @RealTimeWWII. If you’re a history nerd and still on the former bird-site, I highly recommend this handle, which Tweets “live” updates multiple times each day to the corresponding date from WW2. They have just started over in September of 1939, so it’s a perfect time to join.
Cat Weaver of Brand Newsroom went long on the quest for and impossibility of “unbiased media”
Marvel’s show Loki partnered with McDonald’s to turn one of their locations into the 1982 version of itself, and I love it.
This from Ben Thompson of Stratechery is the best breakdown of the Disney-Charter showdown and makes the case for inevitable “rebundling” of content.
Upcoming Topics
A quick preview of some thoughts that are coming together for future posts… If you have any thoughts on any of these I’d love to hear them!
· Analyzing the booming romance industry and related trends
· The mainstreaming of vice (ESPN gets into gambling, Dunkin’ sells alcohol, etc)
· Something about digital identity related to the French Revolution
· Prediction: When (and how) the “Streaming Wars” will end
· An Elegy for a Starcruiser
· Cultural Procrastination (not sure what it even means yet)
· The danger to cultural legacy caused by lack of content ownership