romcoms
The second golden age of the romantic comedy is upon us. From a One Day reboot to #BookTok bestsellers, we investigate what makes a perfect love story in 2024
words: AMY BEECHAM
illustration: eleanor shakespeare
If we asked you to picture a scene from a film that hit you right in the heart, chances are you’d pluck it straight from the romcom canon. Maybe it’s Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks locking eyes atop the Empire State Building in Nora Ephron’s masterwork . Or Andie MacDowell declaring her love for Hugh Grant in the pouring rain in . Maybe it’s Julia Roberts rescuing Richard Gere “right back” on the fire escape in that plays in your mind on repeat. With good reason, the 80s and 90s have long been considered the golden age of the romantic comedy, a heyday for light-hearted stories of love that gave us big feelings, lots of laughs and, usually, happy endings. Since then, superhero-mania and a snobbishness towards ‘unserious’ art (read: anything that draws a majority female audience) has seen the romcom pushed out of the limelight. That was, until last year, when a clip of Zendaya immersed in a steamy, sporty love triangle in the broke the internet and proved once and for all: romance is back on top. We’re only two months in and 2024 is already shaping up to be the year the romcom returns to its former glory, ushering in a slew of hotly anticipated projects starring Hollywood’s very best. Zendaya is, as mentioned, making her romcom debut in April as a tennis player turned coach caught between her ex and her husband, while Academy Award-winners Anne Hathaway and Nicole Kidman will both play women who fall for a younger man in and respectively this year, and teen romcom queen Lindsay Lohan returns to our screens in in March. Combine all this with the fact that sales of romance novels grew by 52% last year to 39 million copies, and it’s obvious that all we want from our entertainment now is, quite simply, love.
