Ranking Rom Coms

It seems that the genre of romantic comedies have made a comeback. For the first time since the late 90s romantic comedies were released in a wave this year. 6 romantic comedies is a lot for a single year and yet here we are. Some were fantastic and some were really really not. But that said we’ve ranked superhero movies and animated movies so I thought that we should rank the romantic comedies of the year. We are going to take this list from worst to best.

In absolutely dead last we have Love Again. Released earlier in the year and starring Priyanka, this film was about a woman whose fiancé died and she finds love again by texting her fiancé's old number. The film was horribly paced, terribly structured and not very well thought out. It felt like a cheap imitation of a romantic comedy with all the tropes and none of the emotion.

Next up we have Maybe I Do which to be fair is only loosely a romantic comedy. Very clearly based on a stage play our leads struggle with the idea of marriage and commitment. The movie itself was fine but the staging and writing simply felt too much like a stage play. And if you are going to adapt something then you need to actually adapt it to the current medium. Stage and film are wildly different things and they need to be treated as such.

Leaps and bounds above the previous two we have Jennifer Lawrence's new movie No Hard Feelings. I think this was a great romantic comedy that does a beautiful job of flipping rom com tropes the other direction. Instead of the woman being oblivious to something that's happening to her that led to this relationship it's the young man that gets caught up in a scheme. Jennifer Lawerance also did a fantastic job and the movie was great.

The next three are actually tied as far as the score I gave them but I will put them in order of what I personally liked the best. The next one (with a 10/10 score) is Love at First Sight. This was released on Netflix earlier this year. It was sweet, very well paced and most importantly is that there was so much emotion and chemistry built up in such a short period of time. I think the script was very good at giving the actors room to do whatever they needed to do to get the story across and it didn’t feel like we moved from one beat to the next because we had to. It was a very natural film and I loved it.

Right in the middle of the top spots we have Anyone But You. Now this one is perfect because it is yet another Shakespeare modernization and those are the rom coms that stand the test of time. She’s The Man, 10 Things I Hate About You are a couple of the greatest romantic comedies of all time and Anyone But You definitely joins that list.

In the top spot is Red, White and Royal Blue. I could break this movie down and use it as a structure study for how to write a romantic comedy, It is seriously a perfect movie. There are people who will tell you that the book is better and that's fine but people need to learn that adaptations are not for accuracy and that if it's not adapted perfectly to get over it. The film as it stands on its own is phenomenal and if you can;t separate the two thats a you problem.