Where Is the Love?

By Jess Cagle

In Sweet Home Alabama, a romantic comedy opening this week, Reese Witherspoon plays a Manhattan fashion designer who returns to her rural hometown to get a divorce from her high school sweetheart. She does not, however, fake her own death as a joke. She does not, while drunk in a honky-tonk, make a crude reference to oral sex. All that was cut because the studio was worried that the heroine of Sweet Home Alabama wouldn't seem sweet enough.

There were other concerns. The ending was reshot in order to make her character more sympathetic. The original script by C. Jay Cox received an overhaul from the uncredited but expensive screenwriter Robert Harling (First Wives Club). At $30million, the movie is expected to be a hit with women, though its chances of seducing significant numbers of males is slim. It's a good example of why Hollywood has such a hard time making romantic comedies. Financially limited, creatively challenging, the genre has fallen onto Hollywood's endangered-species list.

It's not that audiences don't want them. My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the independent movie rejected by major distributors, is on its way to making $140 million, in part because the studios offered no other comedies for older females this past summer. Why not? Because Julia Roberts--who has pretty much cornered the summer romantic-comedy market with hits like Notting Hill and My Best Friend's Wedding--has been on a break from the genre. In general, studios have lost faith in mid-priced films, focusing instead on cheaper movies that turn quick profits (like last summer's Crocodile Hunter flick from MGM, which nearly tripled its $10 million cost at the box office) and mega-budget blockbusters like Spider-Man that can become repeat franchises and play overseas.

Romantic comedies tend to have much smaller profit margins. Last year's Meg Ryan vehicle, Kate & Leopold, cost about $50 million and made just about that domestically. Sweet Home Alabama is a fairly safe bet, but the comparably priced baseball drama The Rookie was a much safer one for the same studio, since it appealed to a broader demographic. Box-office results show that boys resolutely avoid chick flicks. "If you have a female lead in a movie," says Oren Aviv, marketing president for Buena Vista Pictures, "only females are going to go. And you better have a star that girls want to see fall in love."

Good romantic comedies are easy to watch, but they're awfully hard to make. "They get predictable," says producer Marc Platt (Legally Blonde). "You know how they're going to end. Two people are going to wind up together, so you have to make sure that the journey is really interesting." And unlike the golden age of romantic comedies, when Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were trading brilliant barbs, today most of the best writers of the genre are busy working on TV shows like Friends, Sex and the City and Will & Grace. And today's male stars know they can make far more money in action flicks than in flirting pics. How desperate are studios for romantic leading men? Mark Wahlberg landed the Cary Grant role in an upcoming remake of Charade called The Truth About Charlie.

Actresses are more willing to sign up, but while Renee Zellweger, Jennifer Lopez, Cameron Diaz and Witherspoon are high on studios' wish lists when it comes to casting, only Sandra Bullock (at $15 million per picture) and Roberts (at $25 million) are considered sure things in attracting an audience for a comedy on opening weekend.

The genre will never go away, but it's changing and adapting to new circumstances. Director Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, with Adam Sandler, is as disturbing as it is sweet. Next year's Down with Love, with Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, is a campy homage to the Rock Hudson--Doris Day movies of the 1960s. And the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding has had an impact on studios. According to one screenwriter, "Now they really want to find comedies that work for a mature audience, with two strong characters and dialogue that can cut glass." Now that would be truly sweet.