If you grew up during the rom-com golden age of the ’80s and ’90s, chances are that Meg Ryan was a staple in your life. The romantic comedy lover in my house growing up was my dad. His favorite movie was Pretty Woman and if he were alive today, he’d probably watch this trailer and tell you unprompted that he loves Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail more than in Sleepless In Seattle.
So yes, I grew up with Meg Ryan movies. She has, for the most part, been away from the genre she helped build into a thing of legend with movies like When Harry Met Sally and even Kate & Leopold. Now she’s back and is even directing her first romantic comedy! Ryan directed the 2015 drama Ithaca, in which she starred opposite her son Jack Quaid, but she hasn’t directed anything since.
What Happens Later
Who better to dive into the romantic comedy genre behind the lens than the queen of rom-coms herself?! The first trailer for What Happens Later has dropped and features Ryan as a woman stuck in the airport with her former lover (David Duchovny) and we follow along as the two reconnect.
The synopsis for the film is as follows: “Two ex lovers, Bill (David Duchovny) and Willa (Meg Ryan) get snowed in at a regional airport overnight. Indefinitely delayed, Willa, a magical thinker, and Bill, a catastrophic one, find themselves just as attracted to and annoyed by one another as they did decades earlier. But as they unpack the riddle of their mutual past and compare their lives to the dreams they once shared, they begin to wonder if their reunion is mere coincidence, or something more enchanted.”
The rom-com renaissance continues
Hitting theaters on October 13, What Happens Later just seems like those kinds of romantic comedies we’ve shied away from in recent years. A trapped meet cute but between two people who have a shared history? That’s the stuff that dreams are made of. A movie starring Ryan (who is 61 years old) opposite Duchovny (who is 63 years old) is refreshing given how often women are generally not allowed to age in cinema.
It is also exciting to know that Ryan is directing the film. For the most part, the comedy is just a Ryan and Duchovny-led film without much of a supporting cast. Knowing how the two of them can carry a project, it’s exciting to see what they do with the film.
What Happens Later just seems like a cute rom-com of the type we used to get all the time in cinemas. For whatever reason, the classic romantic comedy drifted away for a while and we were spending our time without cute meetings and outlandish circumstances. Luckily, the genre has been making a comeback in recent years and if that means getting new movies starring Meg Ryan while she falls in love, well, we’re all that much better for it.
(featured image: Bleecker Street)
