When Harry Met Sally to Annie Hall to The Big Sick. The genre that has shaped how mainstream cinema dramatises romance.
The romantic comedy is one of cinema's most-commercial sub-genres. The form's central template — two leads who appear to be incompatible discover, across approximately 100 minutes of escalating obstacles, that they are in fact meant for each other — has shaped almost every romantic film since the 1930s screwball tradition. The films below are the ones that, within the template, did something specifically interesting.
Mainstream theatrical rom-com production has substantially declined since the mid-2000s. The form's commercial peak was the 1989-2003 period — Pretty Woman, You've Got Mail, Notting Hill, There's Something About Mary, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, the broader Sandra Bullock and Meg Ryan eras. By the late 2000s, the genre's box-office performance had weakened; by the mid-2010s, mainstream theatrical rom-com was effectively a streaming-platform product.
The decline is, in some sense, structural. Romantic comedies depend on the audience recognising the central pair as believable couples; the era's casting requirements have shifted toward franchise-IP leads whose romantic-pairing potential is secondary to their action-genre commercial viability. Almost every major contemporary rom-com is on a streaming platform (Netflix's Set It Up, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, etc.) rather than in theatrical release. The form survives but in a fundamentally different distribution environment than it occupied during its commercial peak.