Anyone but You hit theaters back in December, but it doesn’t feel like a terribly long time. That’s because the film’s raunchy romp had a far bigger box office pull than anyone was expecting, culminating in a whole new marketing campaign dubbed The Valentine Encore; yep, it flew in theaters for that long.
The film’s success was one of the most uplifting stories in recent Hollywood, with a $219.6 million pull off a $25 million production budget for an honest solid piece of genre work; such is the result one can expect from an equation like Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell as your leads.
With the film now on streaming, Powell has been all too happy to look back on the good choices that made Anyone but You what it was. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he said releasing in theaters over streaming was the best of those choices:
We had offers from every streamer, and it was guaranteed [paydays] and a much bigger budget, but Syd and I really have a very similar worldview about Hollywood. We said, ‘If we make this on a streamer, it won’t have any cultural impact.’ And everyone was saying rom-coms were dead theatrically so we knew we could get hosed, but we thought, ‘Let’s take the gamble,’ because what if we could bring them back?
Time will tell if that “cultural impact” kickstarts a studio rom-com resurgence, but you can’t hope for a home run if you don’t take big swings, and banking on Anyone but You‘s theatrical chops was a very rewarding swing indeed.
Anyone but You is now streaming on Netflix.
