I’m reading a NYT article about the number of sequels this summer, and they comment on how romantic comedies rarely get sequels. Come to think of it, other than the rare chick-flick action movie like Charlie’s Angels, I can’t remember any chick flick that got a sequel. Probably the closest would be Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in the nearly identical You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle, or Jack Nicolson’s As Good As It Gets and Something’s Gotta Give.
Any theories why romcom’s don’t become franchises?
I don’t watch romantic comedies, but I’ve got a guess, based pretty much solely on what I’ve gleaned from trailers:
Romantic comedies are about Person A and Person B getting together. Once they actually get together you don’t have much room for a sequel, unless you break them up again.
In other words, the romantic comedy protagonist can only win once, unless their partner dies of a heart attack or something, while a protagonist to an action movie can win as many times as there are antagonists to defeat.
You know, almighty dollar, scraping the bottom of the barrel, etc. If they somehow found the money for sequels to Are We There Yet, Next Friday, and even Starship Troopers, a sequel to say 10 things I hate about you must be beyond repugnant (i.e. a guaranteed money-losing proposition) for studios.
Of the ones that did get sequels, e.g. Legally Blonde, I wonder why they completely abandoned the romcom elements in the sequels.
Because in general terms, there are two sorts of conflicts in drama: external and internal. Action movies are based on external conflict, romantic comedies are based on internal conflict. The thing about internal conflict is that when it’s over, it’s over, and so is the story; whereas a character can always have another external conflict.
No one one wants to pay to see ‘they didn’t live happily ever after’, or that life is really a series of crushing disillusionments briefly broken up by periods of unrealistic, nee delusional, happiness.
It’s like the understanding we all have of a copy of a copy being less good than a copy of the original. The first movie had a certain charm, without being at all intellectually challenging. Watching a sequel there is a sense of “they wouldn’t drag us back to the theatre to watch them break up, or have one of them die” so you know how it’s going to end. If you think about it enough, you knew how the first one was going to end, too.
Are the Sex and the City movies considered romantic comedies?
*Actually, I believe they’ve made TWO, but I have ony watched one.
I’d say that it’s because romantic comedies, like most stories, are quest stories, wherein the quest is for the relationship (even though the quester(s) don’t necessarily understand that is the object when they begin). The relationship is supposed to be forever; otherwise the quest object is unworthy. If you produce a sequel in which the happy couple from the initial quest are no longer together, it negates the original story - the original quest was for an unworthy thing (unless one of them died - not the stuff of comedy). If you produce a sequel in which the happy couple are together, you have to give them a new quest, and that’s not easy, and is probably also no longer a romantic comedy. The best example I can think of this would be “Meet the Parents” and “Meet the Fokkers”, but neither of them is exactly a romantic comedy, in that mostly the humor does not stem from the interaction between the couple.
Well, Shrek is a “happy ever after” movie with lots of romcom elements. I think it’s possible to take a romcom and do a sequel, but it wouldn’t be easy. The premise of a romcom is will-they-orwon’t-they get together with the right person in the end. Once they do, where are you going to go from there? A mid-life crisis threatening to break them up?
that may not be the only reason though, for despite the same pitfalls action movies get sequels nevertheless. an example is Alien 3, a movie that is dead to me for this exact reason. right in the beginning of the movie, it completely negated all of Ripley’s heroic effort in Aliens. all in the space of a few minutes. ugh.