How Gen Z Turned an R-Rated Rom-Com Into a Sleeper Hit

The film Anyone but You’s paltry $6 million opening over Christmas weekend seemingly confirmed a persistent assumption in Hollywood: Theatrical romantic comedies are a thing of the past. Once a pillar of the release calendar, rom-coms have largely been consigned to the smaller-scale world of streaming. They are seen as more difficult to sell overseas and distinguish at the box office (during that first weekend, Anyone but You lagged behind Wonka and Aquaman 2). Since its lackluster beginning, though, the movie has become that rarest of phenomena—an old-fashioned word-of-mouth hit.

Initially, Sony’s play seemed downright bizarre: Why put an R-rated, sun-dappled rom-com up against family-friendly blockbusters in ice-cold December? The film’s advertising was even more inscrutable, with an unsettling teaser and another much-parodied promo highlighting the “frenemy” vibe between stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. And given its tepid reviews, the film seemed dead on arrival. Opening big is usually the only way to make money in theaters post-shutdowns, as studios battle against an audience that expects every movie to be viewable at home in a matter of weeks.

But Sony is one of the only major studios that doesn’t own a streaming service. It was in no rush to get Anyone but You online, a strategy Paramount or Universal are unlikely to share. As the movie hung around in theaters, the film showed signs of life, making $8.7 million in its second weekend, then $9.7 million in its third. After five weeks, it has made $64 million domestically, almost tripling its budget. It’s part of an incredibly exclusive club of films that opened widely and ultimately made 10 times their opening weekend. The others—The Greatest Showman, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish—were similar December sleeper hits, but they were aimed at families, typically the easiest crowd to attract during the Christmas season.

Anyone but You, on the other hand, is a raunchy comedy that leans into its R rating, with plenty of bad language, sex talk, and nudity. There’s an entire gag built around a doofy Australian hunk showing off his foreskin. In another scene, Powell’s character simply has to strip down to check for poisonous spiders in his pants. In the early 2000s, sex comedies à la American Pie or Wedding Crashers were theatrical sensations, pulling in teenagers and 20-somethings eager to giggle at horny antics on-screen. Lately, that kind of cheap-to-make silliness ends up being put directly on streaming.The studios don’t trust Gen Z to leave their homes to watch it. Powell earned his early fame in such a film—the charming Set It Up—and the only rom-com that has broken through theatrically of late had more cultural import: Crazy Rich Asians.

That Anyone but You is pulling off these box-office numbers while being firmly targeted at 20-somethings exposes a gap in the market. The film is incredibly popular on TikTok, where virality doesn’t necessarily translate into ticket sales. Sweeney’s own online fame, fueled by her TV work on Euphoria and The White Lotus, has played an undeniable role, as have (vehemently denied) rumors about an on-set romance between her and Powell. Some of that buzz can’t be gamed out by publicists and executives in advance, but the important lesson is that such an achievement is possible. In retrospect, the solid success of the Jennifer Lawrence–starring No Hard Feelings (also rated R, also released by Sony) last summer was a harbinger of theatergoers’ appetite for the genre. Now Anyone but You has easily outstripped those grosses, despite opening in a more crowded market.

Most pivotally, the film is doing all of this without being particularly good. Anyone but You is directed by Will Gluck, a filmmaker who’s made far better examples of the genre in the past (Easy A, Friends With Benefits) but is competent enough to give these misadventures appropriate gloss. The plot is based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, echoing previous modern adaptations such as 10 Things I Hate About You. The transplantation basically works, with Sweeney and Powell as frenemies who fake a relationship at a destination wedding and eventually fall in love for real. Both leads are attractive, but their personal chemistry is nonexistent. Sweeney feels particularly uncalibrated for the film’s light, wacky tone, delivering every line with flattened portentousness even as she’s meant to be scatterbrained.

I saw Anyone but You in a theater a couple of weeks after its release with a bunch of friends, the kind of crowd that’s been bumping the film’s box-office position for the past few weeks. None of us particularly loved it, but the entire experience was still a communal blast, a reminder that even C-grade content can feel more fun when watched with a group. Already, 2024 is a weird year for Hollywood; delays from the writers’ and actors’ strikes, as well as possible audience disinterest in superhero movies, resulted in a thinner-than-usual release calendar. But that lack of mega-projects could lend an opportunity for more romantic comedies to break through and build cult appeal, especially if their studios let them play in theaters for a while. Rather than worrying about future copycats being similarly mediocre, audiences should feel optimistic about the prospects of a great rom-com eventually landing in theaters.