Anyone But You

Anyone But You is the romantic comedy Hollywood forgot how to make. Not because it is especially brilliant, but because it is the simplest possible version of the thing it is trying to be: a film about two attractive people who are clearly meant for each other spending 103 minutes refusing to admit it. Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell did that job. The film made $220 million on a $25 million budget. Sometimes the math is not complicated.

The setup is clean. Bea (Sydney Sweeney) is a law student at Boston University. Ben (Glen Powell) works at Goldman Sachs. They meet at a coffee shop, have an all-day first date that ends at his apartment, and then something goes wrong the next morning that each interprets as a deliberate rejection. Six months later, they discover that Bea's sister is marrying Ben's best friend, and they are both going to a wedding in Sydney.

The film is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, which is exactly the right source material for a modern romantic comedy. Beatrice and Benedick are the original enemies-to-lovers template. Two people too witty and too proud to admit vulnerability until the people around them conspire to soften them up. Sweeney and Powell slot into those roles with obvious pleasure. Their bickering has the quality of people who are enjoying the argument too much to end it, which is exactly right.

Director Will Gluck's greatest skill is getting out of his actors' way. He puts Sweeney and Powell in beautiful locations, gives them good material, and trusts the chemistry to do the work. The Sydney setting pays off beautifully. The Opera House, the Harbor, the beaches: the film earns its tourism-ad reputation while using the locations to actually advance the story. The buoy scene, where Bea and Ben tread water in Sydney Harbour after the Titanic reenactment goes wrong, is the film's emotional center and plays it straight. No jokes. Just two people finally telling each other the truth.

The Shakespearean architecture holds up. The eavesdropping scenes, where both characters independently overhear their friends describing the other as secretly in love with them, are the hinge the play has always turned on, and the modern update makes them work without straining credulity. The wedding-party machinations feel true to how actual wedding parties operate: everyone wants the drama resolved so the wedding can happen.

Powell delivers his third consecutive excellent performance in a romantic lead role, and it is worth pausing to appreciate what he is doing. Ben could easily be a type: the confident finance-bro charmer. Powell plays him with a vulnerability underneath the confidence that comes from actual hurt. He has been wounded by what he thinks happened the morning after their date. He has been cold to Bea for six months because he is protecting himself, not because he does not like her. The reveal of the misunderstanding is not played for comedy but for recognition. Oh. That is what happened. Powell's face in that moment is the performance in miniature: relief, regret, and the dawning awareness that they have wasted six months being too proud to ask a simple question.

Sweeney holds her own, which is not a given. She is playing a character in the middle of a quiet crisis, quietly dropping out of law school and breaking off an engagement while performing normalcy for her family. She has chosen not to be the person everyone expects her to be, and she has not yet figured out who she actually is. The Sydney trip, forced into proximity with a man she has been training herself to resent, ends up being the mirror she needed. Sweeney finds the character's uncertainty without making it a sulk.

Now for the scorecard.

Is Anyone But You woke? No. Not meaningfully. The film has diverse supporting cast members, specifically Alexandra Shipp as Bea's best friend Hale. Nobody makes a statement about it. There is no speech about representation. Hale exists to help move the plot forward and provide Bea with someone to confide in. The film's lead couple is a heterosexual man and woman who fall in love because they are attracted to each other and, once they stop lying to each other, discover they like each other too. The story engine is heterosexual romance. The aspirational framework is love and honest connection. The film's emotional resolution is two people choosing each other.

Bea drops out of law school, which some might read as anti-ambition messaging. It is not. The film presents law school as something Bea was doing because it was expected of her, not because she wanted it. Her real passion, never quite specified, is something else she is still figuring out. The film does not frame this as female empowerment vs. traditional expectation. It frames it as a woman figuring out what she actually wants, which is always a more interesting story than a woman executing the plan other people made for her.

The R rating is for language and one discreet sexual scene between Bea and Ben. The sex is not explicit. It is the natural consummation of a romance that has been building across the entire film. Traditional viewers may prefer films where the couple waits for marriage. That is a fair preference. But the sex here is not presented as casual or consequence-free. It is presented as intimacy, the moment Bea and Ben stop performing and start being real with each other. Within the film's moral universe, it is the right moment for the characters, even if it is not the framework traditional viewers prefer.

The film is exactly what it advertises itself to be: a cheerful, sun-drenched, old-fashioned romantic comedy with two movie stars at peak charisma doing what movie stars are supposed to do. It revived a genre Hollywood had given up on. It did $220 million worldwide. It proved that audiences will go to theaters to see attractive people fall in love if you cast the right people and trust the story. That sounds obvious. Apparently Hollywood needed reminding.

RT Critics: 67%. RT Audience: 84%. IMDB: 6.1. Box Office: $220M worldwide on $25M budget. The critics were mixed. The audience loved it. The ratio of budget to gross tells you everything you need to know about whether this movie worked.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Diverse Supporting Cast	1	High	Low	0.35
Female Lead Rejecting Traditional Path	2	Moderate	Moderate	2
Premarital Sex Normalized	2	High	Moderate	1.4
TOTAL WOKE				3.8

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Heterosexual Romance as Central Story Engine	4	High	High	5.04
Marriage as Aspirational Framework	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Classic Courtship Pattern	3	High	High	3.78
Emotional Honesty as Path to Union	2	High	Moderate	1.4
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				12.3

Score Margin: +9 TRAD