This genre, once a secret handshake between in-the-know writers and audiences, has been all but forgotten. Is a sleeper screenwriter ready to revive it?
One of the movies I watched recently for my dialogue book was the romantic comedy, Jerry Maguire. That movie has some of the most iconic lines ever written in it. SHOW ME THE MONNNEYYYYYY! Cameron Crowe had been steadily working up to that moment in time and captured the American zeitgeist with that movie. You think Stranger Things has a cultural impact? Imagine that times 20 with Jerry Maguire.
Romantic comedies have been on my mind lately after reading all these articles about “Bros” tanking at the box office. One of the arguments for why the film failed was that women are the key demo for romantic comedies. So if you give them a romantic comedy without a woman in it, they have no one to relate to. Now you’re dependent on men for your box office. But, oh yeah, men don’t show up for romantic comedies.
Which brings me back to Crowe. Crowe was the guy who figured out the formula for getting men to show up to romantic comedies. He centered his movies around a male main character. He made that character slightly alpha, so as to create an, almost, wish-fulfillment version of a hero for men to root for. And then he didn’t shy away from the love story, which ensured that women got everything they wanted out of the movie as well.
Crowe first birthed this formula in Say Anything. That’s the movie where John Cusack plays Lloyd Dobler, a fast-talking kickboxing instructor who falls in love with a girl who’s way too close to her father. To this day, that film has one of the 25 most iconic images in all of film in it, which is Lloyd holding up the boombox outside Diane’s window playing Peter Gabriel’s, “In Your Eyes.”
But he really turned the formula loose in Jerry Maguire, where we had the overtly alpha sports agent, Jerry Maguire, played by Tom Cruise, try to start his own agency. The movie was the pinnacle of romantic comedies made for men. It had one of the most powerful bromances ever in a movie (with wide receiver and client, Rod Tidwell). It had this wish-fulfillment scenario that all guys love of starting your own business and putting everything on the line to make it work. And, just like Say Anything, it didn’t shy away from the romance.
This was the secret ingredient that no other writer in town seemed to recognize. Some Hollywood writers knew how to write a guy’s movie. Others knew how how to write a girl’s movie. But nobody knew how to mix the two. The key was giving us that “Male” centric storyline but treating the romance with respect, as opposed to making it an afterthought.
There’s one other writer-director who understood the power of this. He just did it in a different genre. That was James Cameron. James Cameron brought the boys on board with his alpha male main characters, some rad special effects and/or cool sci-fi elements, and then he wholly embraced the romance, which ensured that women showed up too. He rode that formula to, at one point, the two most successful movies in history, in Titanic and Avatar.
Getting back to Crowe again, something happened after Jerry Maguire. Elizabethtown had the exact same formula as his previous films. The main character had the cool alpha male job of being a sneaker CEO. Crowe committed to the romance. But something didn’t work. And he tried to do it again with Aloha. Giving us that “cool” military satellite storyline for men, along with the key romance between Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone. But the movie didn’t connect with anybody, men or women. I could write a book about all the mistakes that probably contributed to its failure but the point was, Crowe was now out of the picture with this genre and, except for a couple of exceptions (“Hitch” comes to mind), Hollywood forgot about it.
Until…..…
A young comic/director named Judd Apatow realized that he could tweak the formula. His main change would be to use beta male main characters as opposed to alpha ones. These characters would be dorks, nerds, with not much going on in their life. This would bring in a different kind of male viewer – guys who identified with those groups. But the part of the formula he kept in tact was embracing the romantic components of the story, which was essential to bringing in the female audience.
He also made one other adjustment. He called his movies comedies instead of romantic comedies. It was a branding choice that made men feel more comfortable going to see these films.
Whether by design or not, Apatow had stumbled into the same equation that had made Cameron Crowe a household name. His new tweaking of the formula gave us two instant classics: The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. So it was more than a little bizarre when Apatow abandoned the formula after Knocked Up. Not surprisingly, his movies stopped doing as well. I guess, creatively, he was more interested in drama at the time, which is all well and good. But it left Hollywood’s best kept genre secret without a champion. And that leads us all the way to today. Nobody’s used this formula since.
How could that be?
Hollywood doesn’t just leave money on the table.
There has to be a reason.
Actually, several things happened that contributed to Hollywood forgetting all about this money-printing genre.
First, since 2000, traditional romantic comedies started to do less than stellar numbers at the box office. She’s Out of My League, Friends with Benefits, Leap Year, Just Friends. It was one miss after another. This created the pervasive thought that romantic comedies just didn’t work in the market anymore. A misnomer because it wasn’t that they didn’t work. It was that the movies weren’t as good.
Then Bridesmaids came along and everything changed. It created a movement in Hollywood where leading women were the new leading men. And what better genre to have a leading lady in than the genre that did so well with women in the first place, romantic comedies. It didn’t help that the actress leading all of the big romantic comedies as this time was the devil herself in Katherine Heigel.
Combined with the rise of the Bechedel Test, any remaining male writers who were interested in writing romantic comedies, realized that they weren’t needed here anymore, and moved on to other genres. Throw the birth of streaming into the mix, which seemed to better fit the comedy and romance genres, and this all but pulled romantic comedies off the big screen, which killed the perception of the genre. Now they were seen as “lower tier” movies.
Meanwhile, female writers were mostly writing wish-fulfillment rom-coms that didn’t even attempt to cater to men. This made it so a genre that was already struggling to bring in men had closed the door on them completely.
Another factor is that this industry continues to tell writers, subconsciously or otherwise, don’t write these movies. If you pitched a male-leaning rom-com to the average studio exec right now, they’d look at you cross-eyed. “You want to put a male lead in a romantic comedy?” “You want the female character to be in a supportive role?” “You want her to fall for the man? As opposed to live her best life and not be dependent on a man?” “Are you crazy?”
This is where Hollywood gets it wrong. When it comes down to it, people are going to see what they want to see. Not what Hollywood wants them to want to see. There’s no better example of this than Bros. Hollywood so wanted people to want to see that movie. But there’s the disconnect. You can’t make people want to see something, no matter how good your intentions are. The real world is not a Benchedel Test.
I’m telling you, the male-centric romantic comedy is a goldmine. It’s been proven repeatedly. And it’s there for the taking because very few people know how to write them. Why can’t you be that person? Now, I’m not saying to write one of these movies if you’re not a comedy or romance guy. I’m a big believer that you have to love the genre you’re writing in to write something great. But if this is your genre, don’t be scared off from writing it. Your script is going to feel like a breath of fresh air when people read it since everyone’s been trained to only write these female-led rom-coms right now. It is the perfect time to stand out.
I’m sharing this with you because Hollywood can be really dumb these days and it’s made them forget about what movies people actually want to see. Top Gun proved that in spades. I think the person who writes the next Jerry Maguire is going to prove it as well.
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