Two Marvel favorites outlast a horror franchise as an ‘ER’ legend assumes his new throne on Max

One of the more compelling aspects of romance as a film genre is how it can leverage the parasocial attachment between the public and the celebrities they admire. This to say, if you look at a movie like Anyone But You — the rom-com sleeper hit from 2023 — it’s easy to trace its box office success back to the fact that it stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell; two high-profile movie stars that you can casually hang out with and observe the attractiveness of, per rom-com parameters.

This is one of the tools in We Live in Time‘s bag of tricks, given its pairing of Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield of Black Widow and Spider-Man fame, but it has a lot more going for it than two popular, in-demand thespians kissing each other. One of those things is its current prominence on the Max charts.

Per FlixPatrol, We Live in Time is living it up at the top of Max’s film charts in the United States at the time of writing, beating out a quartet of Final Destination films in the rankings (namely, the first, second, third, and fifth entries in the franchise, which occupy the charts’ second, fourth, sixth, and fifth placements, respectively).

Elsewhere, Noah Wyle continues to dazzle audiences in The Pitt, which is enjoying its own spell atop the United States’ Max television rankings at the time of writing. Wyle, who portrays the show’s lead character Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, already has quite the medical drama prestige thanks to his time as John Carter on ER. That performance earned him nominations for three Golden Globes and five Emmy Awards.

We Live in Time stars Pugh and Garfield as Almut and Tobias, two thirty-somethings whose decade-long relationship is tracked from the moment of their first meeting, all the way to life after cancer takes Almut from Tobias and their daughter.

The film’s defining characteristic is its non-linear narrative, which causes us to jump around the timeline of Tobias’ and Almut’s relationship. This serves to highlight the relationship we all have to time, and how we primarily experience it through our most emotionally powerful memories, rather than those that most recently occurred.

This furthermore encourages viewers to consider how important it is to create the most meaningful memories possible, which is additionally emphasized by our early knowledge that Almut is going to die at the end of the film. This knowledge forces this family to carefully consider what they’re going to do with their extremely limited time together.

The emotional goal of We Live in Time, then, is to help us realize that our time on Earth — cancer or no cancer — is fundamentally limited, and so the best use of that time involves creating as much beauty as we can with one another. That’s a story worth exposing oneself to, even if you flock to it for no other reason than wanting to see Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield do the kissy-kissy.