You sit down after a hard day and turn on your TV to find a lighthearted Romance movie to watch, when you finally land a new movie you’ve never seen before.
Time passes and you can’t seem to focus on it or keep your eyes open long enough to know what’s happening, eventually turning it off and switching to the same Romantic Comedy you’ve seen a hundred times before.
Romantic Comedies or Rom-Coms date back to Greek times with plays and stories such as “Helen” by Euripides and “Lysistrata” by Aristophanes, continuing through Shakespeare in plays like “The Comedy of Errors” and many other writers.
A Rom-com is a romantic movie or series layered with comedy. These movies make tropes, or a recurring theme within many other rom-com movies.
“The Proposal” is the fake dating trope, “10 Things I Hate About You” is the good girl with bad boy trope, “She’s All That” is the makeover trope, so is “He’s All That,” and “Miss Congeniality.”
These ‘classics’ are so classic that there’s hundreds of others trying to recreate the same success, making the genre oversaturated and boring.
If you take the movie “27 Dresses” and look up movies similar to it, there’s tons, and almost all of them have something to do with a wedding and two best friends or sisters fighting for the love of one man.
Even recent romances with the series “The Summer I Turned Pretty” being a love triangle between the three main characters. The same trope is within “The Vampire Diaries”, “My Life with the Walter Boys”, “XO, Kitty” and hundreds of others, old and new.
With all this success of these Rom-coms people in the industry are becoming less and less creative.
The ‘fat’ girl always has to have a makeover and become skinny or has to feel horrible about her body until some man comes along to accept her despite it.
A nerd always has to be shy and innocent, never wanting to raise their voice unless it’s to the most popular guy in school, who they secretly have a big crush on.
Nobody’s thinking outside of the box anymore, the industry is taking these creative ideas and treating them like the rules for the perfect Rom-Com instead of inspiration.
As the years go by these cash grabs for money hungry writers are always gonna be made, but at least we still have the tried and true Rom-Com classics.
