The next time your agent tells you to do a romantic comedy movie show them this article.
Recently, on reddit user IRicePie broke down the recent numbers for romantic comedies and things don’t look that good.
Here’s a list of the most successful romantic comedies in the last 30 years.
The romantic comedies that finished in the top 10 for their year are:
1980-1989
- Coming To America (3rd in 1988)
- Arthur (4th in 1981)
- Moonstruck (5th in 1987)
- The Secret of My Success (7th in 1987)
- Splash (10th in 1984)
1990-1999
- There’s Something About Mary (3rd for 1998)
- Pretty Woman (4th in 1990)
- Sleepless in Seattle (5th in 1993)
- As Good As It Gets (6th in 1997)
- My Best Friend’s Wedding (9th in 1997)
- Runaway Bride (9th in 1999) 2000-2009
- What Woman Want (5th in 2000)
- My Big Fat Greek Wedding (5th in 2002)
2010-Present
- None (Silver Linings Playbook at 23rd place for 2012 is the closest)
To this day many critics argue that the most successful movies are romantic comedies.
At the end of the day, romantic comedies have gone very formulaic over the past twenty years. It’s always the same movie right down to the ending where the deeply flawed man who makes a mistake has to win over the girl at the end. Which probably explains why ‘Trainwreck‘ wasn’t a major hit in the movie theaters but, the only difference is that the female is the flawed person.
Other movie genres are constantly evolving and as movie theater attendance rates drop, producers will have to either stop making romantic comedies or get original because people are not interested in rom-coms.
