![]() It’s about time, because these movies seem to make good business sense. In 2023, it seems that Hollywood is finally starting to accept older female heroines that are funny, layered and in possession of a complex romantic past. And let’s face it, what’s a romcom without a dramatic airport reunion? She will play Willa, a woman reunited with an ex for the first time in decades when they both find themselves snowed in at an airport. Her next project will be W hat Happens Later, described as an “evolved and nostalgic” spin on the genre. And later this year, Gabrielle Union will star in another Netflix offering, The Perfect Find.Īlso making a major romcom comeback is Meg Ryan, the genre’s undisputed queen in the 90s thanks to roles in Nora Ephron movies such as Sleepless In Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally. Or Jennifer Lopez’s recent release, Shotgun Wedding, where the multi-hyphenate star plays a woman whose destination wedding goes seriously awry when it’s hijacked by terrorists (OK, we never said that these stories had to be totally realistic…). Take Reese Witherspoon’s latest effort, Your Place Or Mineon Netflix, which sees her play a single mother who ends up swapping lives with her best friend (Ashton Kutcher) and inadvertently falling into a long-distance romance in the process. Two decades on, these women, now in their 40s, 50s and 60s, are making a triumphant return to a genre that once might have written them off. It’s part of a wave of films exploring love in midlife, many of them headed up by some of the most bankable stars of the romcom’s 90 and 00s golden age. When he gets engaged just before that cut-off point, she realises that she’s in love with him – and decides to sabotage the wedding. Or consider My Best Friend’s Wedding: Julia Roberts’s character, Julianne, makes a vow to marry her male best friend if both were single at the frankly decrepit age of… 28. It’s framed as somehow surprising that a man like Mark Darcy would like someone like Bridget Jones “very much, just as you are”. ![]() ![]() This tick-tick-ticking of the clock wasn’t just background noise or subtext, either in many cases, the whole plot was based around it. If she remained single at the stroke of midnight on this milestone, the best she could hope for would be to provide comic value, thereafter becoming the butt of jokes about just how hopeless, washed up and generally past it she was. Woe betide her if she entered the fourth decade of her life without having settled down with ‘the one’. If you grew up watching romantic comedies in the 90s and early 00s, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a woman’s chances of falling in love all but disappeared as soon as she hit 30. ![]()
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