Vulture recently profiled the romance novelist Emily Henry in an article so effective it swallowed my entire weekend. Henry has three novels out, with a fourth coming late April. Stocked in that small section most indie bookstores reserve for “respectable” romances, the ones with cute cartoon figures lounging on the cover against bright backgrounds, all three were easy to acquire. I read one a day, usually until 3 AM, tears leaking from my eyes and a giddy smile permanently on my face. I love getting this absorbed in a book, but it’s only ever been romance that does it. They make me lose time, make my already high reading speed become Olympic-level.
I wish I could say the same for the vast majority of their adaptations. Despite their very recent publication dates, two of Henry’s three novels have already been optioned and I find myself in a familiar bubble of happiness/anxiety. Her novels are good. They’ve got a sweetness to them I don’t want to see ruined. This is a fear one could have about any adaptation (looking at you, weird Netflix Persuasion and weird Netflix Rebecca). But the classics tend to have un undimmable aura about them; a bad adaptation doesn’t wreck your vision of them, doesn’t make you see the characters permanently through the wrong actor’s eyes or the wrong director’s camera. When you adapt a contemporary novel, that’s your one shot. With romance novels, the precarity with which they perch in the literary public’s mind only adds to their vulnerability. You have to take a book seriously to adapt it into a good movie. And although things are changing for the better (and although romance as a genre largely pays for the publishing party), there’s still a lot about these books in particular we don’t take seriously.
Bridgerton has opened a lot of new doors, or cracked them wider. When Bridgerton did its thing, it wasn’t like it was the first time someone had adapted a romance novel into something that other people really liked. The Notebook is practically romance novel royalty, launching the heartthrob aspect of Ryan Gosling’s career and inspiring many other Nicholas Sparks adaptations. 11 of his novels have been adapted into movies of decidedly declining quality, but there was a moment, around Notebook, when he was a bankable source material. The Notebook made $115M at the box office and maintains a 53% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but his other films have had trouble breaking 30%. Critical attention isn’t the only thing to judge a film on, of course. But his box office numbers have also declined steadily, with 2016’s The Choice only making $23M.
Sparks, for his part, has asserted that, “"if you look for me [in a bookstore], I'm in the fiction section", because "Love stories — it's a very different genre [from romance]." This recalls a quote from the Emily Henry novel Beach Read,
If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns do you know what you’d get? Fiction. Just fiction … but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I’ve eliminated half of the Earth’s population from my potential readers, and you know what? I don’t feel ashamed of that. I feel pissed.
For what its worth, both Sparks and Henry are still usually to be found in the Romance section, despite what they or their characters may wish. Sometimes progressive genre-busting must be sacrificed to the demands of shelving convenience. The publishing industry, as far as I can tell (as a bitter, sad person who was once swept up in a round of layoffs at Hachette) has a set of established and slightly boring marketing principles and it sticks to them. People want to know what they’re getting when they open a book, and they’re increasingly turning to reviews on BookTok and YouTube before buying a book (and those sites overwhelmingly review “romance novels”) to make sure that they’re getting something that will fit their hazy (or very exact) parameters. Being shelved in the socially approved romance section of a bookstore has become a lot more of a boost to sales than otherwise, even if it is a largely artificial construct. If it wasn’t effective, it would be all alphabetic and Sparks could find himself near Sophocles (where he possibly thinks he belongs, having compared his writing to that of the ancients, along with Hemingway, to which I say: daddy issues).
Wherever he thinks he should be shelved, Sparks’ novel represented a noticeable shift in the way romantic movies were being made. For one thing, his novels are maudlin as all hell, often having dubiously happy endings (A Walk to Remember scarred me for eternity). But Sparks opened the door wider to the idea that when looking for source material, you could go to the already established genre of romance novels (or “love stories,” as he would have it). This has been a challenge mostly taken up by YA in the last two decades, with the Twilight series obviously leading the pack (if anything is a romance novel, that is a romance novel, shelving be damned). YA romance has clearly fought to have itself taken seriously, with movies like The Fault in Our Stars and the To All the Boys… series adapted by a team of people who clearly respect the source material. Adult romance has pulled itself back into the mainstream with the 50 Shades books and their big-budget adaptations, which clearly rode on the expectations the Twilight movies had created. Meanwhile, throughout the rise of the adapted rom-com screenplay, there’s been a corresponding decline in any other kind of rom-com.
In a 2021 piece for CNN.com, Leah Asmelash wrote,
“My Best Friend’s Wedding,” a 1997 movie starring Julia Roberts, Dermot Mulroney and Cameron Diaz, was made on a $38 million budget, but worldwide, the movie brought in more than $299 million. “Pretty Woman,” (1990) with Roberts and Richard Gere, was made on a miniscule $14 million budget, but brought in a whopping $463.4 million worldwide.
Even as late as 2009, “The Proposal,” starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, was made on a budget of $40 million and grossed $317.3 million worldwide.
As studios have moved away from mid-budget movies and focused instead on gigantic action films with the budget of mid-size nations, something has also shifted in the culture, some ineffable hardening towards movies like this. There seems to be no guarantee that new audiences will be looking for rom-coms, and certainly no expectation that a movie theatre is where anyone would go to watch one. Movie theatres are for Event movies made by Chris Nolan; your couch and a pint of ice cream is where you’re going to watch Reese Witherspoon have zero chemistry with Ashton Kutcher. Their recent film, Your Place or Mine, is from an original screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna, who wrote many successful mid-2000s rom-coms and seems to be doing a pastiche of those past successes, resulting in a film that feels more like it was written by an AI trained only on mid-2000s rom-coms. To avoid that fate, studios are once again turning to stories with established audiences.
That brings us, roughly, to today. Once I had exhausted Emily Henry’s novels, I turned to the internet (not BookTok; I’m too scared) to give me some recommendations on what else I should read. One book on everyone’s list was Sally Thorne’s 2016 workplace enemies-to-lovers novel The Hating Game, which was adapted into a film in 2021. The Hating Game is a really bad movie. Somehow actress Lucy Hale has spent her time post-Pretty Little Liars in a purgatory of bad romance adaptations (A Nice Girl Like You, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry). I don’t know which Hollywood witch she pissed off, but I think the curse is spreading. A Nice Girl Like You is less a movie and more an exercise in repeated humiliations for Hale; I got 45 minutes in before I felt the need to stop watching it forever and request a wellness check for her. I can’t speak to all the source material for these and other recent adaptations, but my desire to read them plummeted after watching these films. Either the source material is abjectly awful, or these movies were made with an utter lack of respect for that source material. Or both.
And lo we come to the point, for I have noticed a trend in romance adaptations these last few years. The YA adaptations seem to have found a solid footing; perhaps showrunners and producers fear young wrath if they were to mistreat beloved characters (rightly so). Shadow and Bone, To All the Boys…, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Love, Simon, The Miseducation of Cameron Post and many more are recent extremely decent, respectful adaptations of their YA (and romantic) source material. Many more adaptations have been greenlit in recent years, and I expect the quality to remain high. But what of adult romance?
The recently greenlit Emily Henry film adaptations will join a world peopled by few good romance adaptations. The After series, by Anna Todd is probably the most well-known recent adaptation, mostly because it’s caused controversy and consternation across the internet as a series that started as Harry Styles fan-fic and glorifies an abusive relationship. Those movies are very bad (yet they keep making them and I keep watching! The things I say I do for you, dear reader) but their source material is also very bad, making them something of a brazil nut to me (tough nut to crack and once you do you wish you hadn’t). Other recent examples include Me Before You (which I didn’t personally like because medical tragedy romance is very much not my yum; those “Only Happy Endings” guarantees in some authors’ bios make me retch but also are super helpful!), Outlander (an outstanding adaptation), Virgin River (an unexpected winner for Netflix and very sweet), and the Discovery of Witches series (love the books, wish the show had 8X its budget and could have 10X the episodes to actually do this series properly). But absolutely nothing has really done the romance novel adaptation up right the way Bridgerton has. Bridgerton understood its assignment, its audience, and its detractors and not only treats its source material with respect, it carefully updates some of its more passé tropes.
I’ve used the word “respect” a lot in this essay, and I’ve done so because I see the lack of respect “romance” as a genre has gotten over the years. Some of that lack of respect is warranted; I have an MA in English literature from an East Coast private school so I am contractually obligated to defend the concept of quality writing. I try not to be a quality relativist, and keep my standards lower for fiction in this genre, instead trying to imagine how I would have responded to it if I had picked it up in a strictly alphabetical bookstore and was able to respond to it without its marketing context. That’s a losing game, but one worth playing, because you can absolutely win. There are a ton of “romance” novels that are high-quality explorations of the love between two people. That might be a deeply uncool topic but you can hardly say its an unimportant one.
Daisy Jones and the Six is a great example of a book that’s often shelved in both romance and fiction because its author, Taylor Jenkins Reid, has written books that keep a foot in both worlds. She manages to have a fanatical BookTok following and the kind of Reese’s book club respectability that translates to a different kind of sales. As a result of this balancing act, that novel got a very respectful adaptation by Amazon that clearly took its source material seriously. As of this writing, all of her other novels, including The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, One True Loves, Carrie Soto is Back, and Malibu Rising have been optioned.
One of my favorite romance discoveries (and one that has both feet firmly planted in romance) is The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazlewood. Hazlewood (which is a pen name) is a neuroscience professor who wrote online fan fiction in her spare time until a literary agent reached out asking if she’d be interested in writing full-length romances. That may sound like a literal dream life for those of us with long-held literary yearnings, but apparently dreams do come true. She has a multi-book deal, with two novels coming out this year alone and Hypothesis was recently optioned for a film adaptation as well. Furthermore, the novels are great. They’re playful and sincere, with clear writing and well-developed characters (along with a long of legit neuroscience jargon, if that floats your boat). Colleen Hoover, the controversial queen of BookTok (and someone I see people read on planes a lot, but I haven’t taken the leap yet), is also getting a bunch of adaptations, with Blake Lively signed on to star in her blockbuster BookTok-obsessing novel It Ends With Us, guaranteeing a big budget and big attention.
This is all really exciting to me. Romance is clearly a huge and unwieldy genre, and I love seeing the cream rise to the top, as it were, and get the chance to have those stories realized on the screen. I have long thought that it was an under-tapped genre for film and television adaptations, and with the success of Bridgerton, I think a lot of people in positions to do something about it have started to think along the same lines. But I remain worried, mainly because I have seen what these adaptations look like when don’t take their source material seriously. You can absolutely quibble with the 50 Shades movies and books (neither are awful but also neither are going to be winning a Nobel), but those adaptations took their source material 100% seriously. They looked at the joy and pleasure millions of people (millions of women, really) got out of those books and they didn’t laugh at it, even when the culture at large did. They decided they would try to give people that same joy and pleasure, not as a cash grab or a zeitgeist-chasing move, but with a level of earnestness I have found sorely lacking in other recent adaptations.
If we are entering a golden age of romance novel adaptations, I want the guiding light to be that: people love these books; they cry over them; they read them in bed until 3 AM knowing the ending is going to be happy but also just a teeny bit worried (ok a LOT worried) that maybe this time it won’t be. This is why BookTok is the phenomenon it is: for all that the enthusiasm and pure emotion of its participants can terrify me, these are people who LOVE books. Whether you’re calling these books “romance novels” or “books about love” and no matter where you’re shelving them, these books are the inheritors of the marriage plot. They are where novels began, with a story about human emotion, human mistakes, human redemption. No matter the medium, I ask that be sold to us sincerely.