‘Bride Wars’ lands in the Netflix Top 10, an unlikely comeback for a loathed movie that served as a major red flag for the entire rom-com genre
Typically, the ammunition to bring down an entire genre of movies is a series of box office flops. There can be other cultural headwinds, of course, but nothing speaks louder than perceived audience rejection, even if that often has more to do with specific movies than a broader type. So based on the number of mainstream theatrically released romantic comedies in the early 2010s (over a dozen in 2010) versus the end of the decade (half as many), clearly something must have happened, oh around the turn of the decade or so. Historians, of course, will recall a great tragedy that befell rom-com nation in January 2009: the declaration of the Bride Wars.
The thing is, Bride Wars, a movie starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway as lifelong besties who become embroiled in bitter competition when their weddings are accidentally booked on the same day the same dream location, was a hit. Not a huge hit, but it raked in $58 million in the U.S. alone and over $100 million worldwide. For comparison’s sake, those numbers today would easily make it the biggest American comedy of 2025. Or 2024. So it couldn’t have tanked an entire genre, not compared to early 2010s rom-com flops like Killers, The Switch, and How Do You Know. Or could it?
Well, maybe. Bride Wars did garner particularly withering reviews, barely scraping into double digits on the ol’ Tomatometer, and it received a “C+” CinemaScore, the kind of opening-night poll numbers often reserved for downbeat dramas or schlocky horror movies. Much of that disappointment could probably be chalked up to its pedigree, which is likely the same reason it’s currently popping on the Netflix Top 10: It’s a movie teaming up Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson! Hathaway didn’t yet have her Oscar, but she was well-known from the Princess Diaries movies and the recent hit The Devil Wears Prada. Hudson was a bona fide genre queen, working in rom-coms frequently and best-known for the two she did with Matthew McConaughey. Add the fact that starry movies with wedding themes did well with audiences throughout the 2000s, and this should have been the girl-pal equivalent of Tom Hanks meeting Meg Ryan.
That does, however, point to another important aspect of Bride Wars: It’s only a partially a romantic comedy. The movie is about the escalating rivalry between Hudson’s Liv and Hathaway’s Emma. The grooms, played by Steve Howey (Liv’s Daniel) and a surprisingly relaxed Chris Pratt (Emma’s Fletcher), are offscreen for long periods. There is a third guy, in the form of Liv’s brother Nate (Bryan Greenberg) – and maybe his subplot about having a secret lifelong crush on Emma would be sweeter if it had more to do with the movie at hand.
That sounds counterintuitive; it should be great that this romantic comedy centers female friendship (and toxic competition), rather than a woman feeling incomplete until she finds the right man. They’re essentially competing over themselves: their shared romantic ideals and also their friendship. There’s potentially some satirical fun to be had, too, at the expense of the bridal industrial complex and a culture that still places such outsized importance on weddings in the minds of young women. Casey Wilson and June Diane Raphael, who are co-credited on the screenplay and both have small roles in the finished film, seem like a fine choice to explore these absurdities in a story that should ultimately be about some combination of female friendship and grown-up romance.
But, as was noted at the time, the movie goes about it in about the least satirical, most blunt-force away imaginable that could still conceivably attract Hudson and Hathaway into a PG-13 light comedy. So there’s a “prank” involving Liv’s weight (marking perhaps the first time Kate Hudson has ever been tasked with playing someone with more than 2% body fat) that doesn’t really pay off; she realizes that she’s been tricked into eating a variety of sweets while training to maintain her weight, and then gets upset. No escalation, no clever twist; one amusing joke about the “international butter club” (“you’ve been sitting around eating butter from different lands?”) that sounds more like Wilson and Raphael and is tacked on to the end of the scene.
Much of the movie has that feel; it’s chopped and montaged within an inch of its life (runtime when the credits roll: 84 minutes), as if everyone involved, including the late director Gary Winick (Tadpole) was torn between giving it their best effort and running like hell to get away from the result. Even the movie’s fraught timeline is accelerated: The same-day weddings are presented as the only real obstacle to the entire enterprise getting turned around in three months, an absurdly compressed amount of time to plan and execute a Plaza wedding of anyone’s dreams. That’s really why Bride Wars might have damaged an entire genre: It attempts to rib the ridiculousness of wedding obsession, and succeeds in making the whole idea of even watching a movie about wedding obsession seem intensely onerous and meaningless at the same time.
Bride Wars can’t be the sole recipient of this blame. In fact, by coming out in January 2009, it kicked off a truly appalling year for the romantic and romantic-adjacent comedy, one that included the sour marriage-themed Couples Retreat, the would-be frothiness of a Confessions of a Shopaholic, the dreary ensemble He’s Just That Into You, the vulgar Katherine Heigl/Gerard Butler team-up The Ugly Truth, the teen flop I Love You, Beth Cooper (based on a great comic novel), the smash hit The Proposal (still bad!), and two different Nia Vardalos movies. The best we could do was It’s Complicated (mid-level Nancy Meyers) and (500) Days of Summer (ambitious, bittersweet, still kind of sour). A year after the release of Bride Wars, Amy Adams was going through the same degradation as Hathaway and Hudson, starring in the retrograde and vaguely depressing Leap Year.
So as bad as this movie is, it might not even be the worst romantic comedy of its year, and it certainly wasn’t the biggest hit or flop. It was more of a warning sign: If two Oscar nominees could get themselves into this mess, maybe no one was safe from a rom-com movie or a wedding movie or a “girl movie” going horribly wrong. It should have been clear a decade earlier, but the post-When Harry Met Sally refractory period was over, and the golden age of rom-com as a star-making proving ground was long gone. Begun, the Bride Wars had.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
