Hollywood isn’t experiencing a romance drought. If anything, it’s drowning in love stories. Over the past few years, studios and streamers, especially Netflix, have aggressively pursued romance adaptations, securing bestselling novels and viral BookTok favorites at record speed.
From Emily Henry to Colleen Hoover, from the classics to Wattpad fan fiction, romance is everywhere. Yet, despite strong box-office numbers and constant online hype, in my opinion, many of these films feel hollow. They’re watched, tweeted about, and instantly forgotten.
Objectively, this kind of trend makes sense. Romance novels dominate bestseller lists, and BookTok — a TikTok subcommunity that exploded during the pandemic — has become one of the most powerful marketing engines in publishing.
As one industry observer put it, “Millions of those fans are part of the online community known as BookTok… [they] particularly like to rally around the romance genre, or ‘smut’ books.”
Studios see a built-in audience and guaranteed engagement. As a result, adaptations such as It Ends With Us and Regretting You prove that financial success doesn’t require critical acclaim, just hype.
This strategy has only intensified during streaming wars. After mergers like Warner Bros.’ acquisition of Discovery, studios are incentivized to produce fast, frequent content rather than slow, carefully developed films. Romance adaptations fit perfectly into this model: aesthetically pleasing, emotionally legible, and easily consumable.
Recently, Netflix even hosted a summer-themed premiere for People We Meet on Vacation, complete with tote bags and BookTok sweepstakes winners. The adaptation wasn’t just a movie — it was marked as an event, a brand extension.
Here’s where the disconnect starts to show, especially for Gen-Z women who grew up on both classic romances and TikTok relationship discourse. Many adaptations flatten what made the books compelling in the first place.
Persuasion (2022), starring Dakota Johnson, radically altered Jane Austen’s restrained emotional interiority in favor of ironic asides and modernized humor. When the source material depends on silence, longing, and repression, these changes aren’t cosmetic; they undermine the story’s entire emotional logic.
Persuasion isn’t an isolated example. Wuthering Heights has been adapted countless times, yet poor casting or overly literal direction often strips the story of its ferocity and moral discomfort. The romance becomes aesthetic instead of unsettling.
At the same time, contemporary romance writing has become aggressively trope-driven: enemies-to-lovers, best-friends-to-lovers, stepbrother pipelines, and “spicy” scenes that substitute explicitness for intimacy.
Tropes aren’t inherently bad, but when everything is written to be instantly recognizable, nothing feels earned. New-age authors fall into this trap, reproducing the same stories without interrogating why they worked in the first place.
This is where youth culture enters the picture. Dating apps encourage emotional avoidance. TikTok compresses relationships into aesthetics and trends. “Smut” novels promise intensity and passion without vulnerability.
The result is a generation increasingly fluent in the language of romance but disconnected from its substance. Films like My Oxford Year and shows like My Life with the Walter Boys feel less like stories and more like elongated TikToks: they are pretty, predictable, and emotionally risk-averse.
Even when these projects succeed commercially, that success can be misleading. A box-office hit doesn’t mean a film resonates intellectually or lasts culturally. Regretting You, for example, performed well financially, but audience responses were largely disparaging. Viewers watched it because they were promised romance, not because the film offered anything new or challenging. And has anyone spoken about it since?
Ultimately, romance adaptations feel disappointing because they’re no longer designed to deepen our understanding of love. They’re designed to be consumed quickly by an audience trained on short-form content.
To entertain the youth, studios make romance insubstantial and emotionally safe, and in doing so, they forget what made romance powerful in the first place: risk, specificity, and the ability to be vulnerable with someone else, deeply.
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