No. of Recommendations: 0
At the same time, there are some that have done very, very well in the past decade. The aforementioned La La Land was one. The standout for me was how popular Crazy Rich Asians became. It was both quite cute and a very "feel good" type movie with a typical rom-com happy ending.Yes - but Crazy Rich Asians was able to avoid the big problem with modern rom-coms, because it was set in another cultural milieu. So it avoided the major problem with modern rom-coms:
No, there’s more at work here than the vagaries of stars or studios. It’s not just them; it’s us.
Among the most fundamental obligations of romantic comedy is that there must be an obstacle to nuptial bliss for the budding couple to overcome. And, put simply, such obstacles are getting harder and harder to come by. They used to lie thick on the ground: parental disapproval, difference in social class, a promise made to another. But society has spent decades busily uprooting any impediment to the marriage of true minds. Love is increasingly presumed—perhaps in Hollywood most of all—to transcend class, profession, faith, age, race, gender, and (on occasion) marital status.https://archive.ph/7CiQw#selection-1951.0-1955.581Set the rom-com in another time period or a different culture, where those obstacles are still very much in play, and the story engine can hum along beautifully. That's Crazy Rich Asians - the difference in social class drives the story conflict. High-concept rom-coms can also do a great job of getting around this, because the "what if" premise itself can create an obstacle. And, of course, there's still a number of ways to create some obstacle to their relationship ("There's a misunderstanding!" "He's uptight while she's a free spirit!" "She's a big city corporate lawyer while he's the small town owner of a Christmas shop!") But generally, many of the plausible reasons why your two impossibly attractive leads don't just get on with their relationship in the first act have disappeared.
