Anyone But You
Anyone But You is the romantic comedy Hollywood forgot how to make. Not because it is especially brilliant, but because it is the simplest possible version of the thing it is trying to be: a film about two attractive people who are clearly meant for each other spending 103 minutes refusing to admit …
Full analysis below
NOT A WOKE TRAP. Anyone But You delivers exactly what its marketing promises: a glossy, sun-drenched romantic comedy with two attractive leads bickering their way toward inevitable love. There is no ideological bait-and-switch. The film is not hiding a lecture behind the chemistry. It is a Shakespeare adaptation set in Sydney, and the ideology at its core is the oldest one in storytelling: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Conservative viewers should feel comfortable with the content. The R rating is for language and one brief sexual scene, not ideology.
Our Verdict on Anyone But You
Anyone But You is the romantic comedy Hollywood forgot how to make. Not because it is especially brilliant, but because it is the simplest possible version of the thing it is trying to be: a film about two attractive people who are clearly meant for each other spending 103 minutes refusing to admit it. Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell did that job. The film made $220 million on a $25 million budget. Sometimes the math is not complicated.
The setup is clean. Bea (Sydney Sweeney) is a law student at Boston University. Ben (Glen Powell) works at Goldman Sachs. They meet at a coffee shop, have an all-day first date that ends at his apartment, and then something goes wrong the next morning that each interprets as a deliberate rejection. Six months later, they discover that Bea's sister is marrying Ben's best friend, and they are both going to a wedding in Sydney.
The film is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, which is exactly the right source material for a modern romantic comedy. Beatrice and Benedick are the original enemies-to-lovers template. Two people too witty and too proud to admit vulnerability until the people around them conspire to soften them up. Sweeney and Powell slot into those roles with obvious pleasure. Their bickering has the quality of people who are enjoying the argument too much to end it, which is exactly right.
Director Will Gluck's greatest skill is getting out of his actors' way. He puts Sweeney and Powell in beautiful locations, gives them good material, and trusts the chemistry to do the work. The Sydney setting pays off beautifully. The Opera House, the Harbor, the beaches: the film earns its tourism-ad reputation while using the locations to actually advance the story. The buoy scene, where Bea and Ben tread water in Sydney Harbour after the Titanic reenactment goes wrong, is the film's emotional center and plays it straight. No jokes. Just two people finally telling each other the truth.
The Shakespearean architecture holds up. The eavesdropping scenes, where both characters independently overhear their friends describing the other as secretly in love with them, are the hinge the play has always turned on, and the modern update makes them work without straining credulity. The wedding-party machinations feel true to how actual wedding parties operate: everyone wants the drama resolved so the wedding can happen.
Powell delivers his third consecutive excellent performance in a romantic lead role, and it is worth pausing to appreciate what he is doing. Ben could easily be a type: the confident finance-bro charmer. Powell plays him with a vulnerability underneath the confidence that comes from actual hurt. He has been wounded by what he thinks happened the morning after their date. He has been cold to Bea for six months because he is protecting himself, not because he does not like her. The reveal of the misunderstanding is not played for comedy but for recognition. Oh. That is what happened. Powell's face in that moment is the performance in miniature: relief, regret, and the dawning awareness that they have wasted six months being too proud to ask a simple question.
Sweeney holds her own, which is not a given. She is playing a character in the middle of a quiet crisis, quietly dropping out of law school and breaking off an engagement while performing normalcy for her family. She has chosen not to be the person everyone expects her to be, and she has not yet figured out who she actually is. The Sydney trip, forced into proximity with a man she has been training herself to resent, ends up being the mirror she needed. Sweeney finds the character's uncertainty without making it a sulk.
Now for the scorecard.
Is Anyone But You woke? No. Not meaningfully. The film has diverse supporting cast members, specifically Alexandra Shipp as Bea's best friend Hale. Nobody makes a statement about it. There is no speech about representation. Hale exists to help move the plot forward and provide Bea with someone to confide in. The film's lead couple is a heterosexual man and woman who fall in love because they are attracted to each other and, once they stop lying to each other, discover they like each other too. The story engine is heterosexual romance. The aspirational framework is love and honest connection. The film's emotional resolution is two people choosing each other.
Bea drops out of law school, which some might read as anti-ambition messaging. It is not. The film presents law school as something Bea was doing because it was expected of her, not because she wanted it. Her real passion, never quite specified, is something else she is still figuring out. The film does not frame this as female empowerment vs. traditional expectation. It frames it as a woman figuring out what she actually wants, which is always a more interesting story than a woman executing the plan other people made for her.
The R rating is for language and one discreet sexual scene between Bea and Ben. The sex is not explicit. It is the natural consummation of a romance that has been building across the entire film. Traditional viewers may prefer films where the couple waits for marriage. That is a fair preference. But the sex here is not presented as casual or consequence-free. It is presented as intimacy, the moment Bea and Ben stop performing and start being real with each other. Within the film's moral universe, it is the right moment for the characters, even if it is not the framework traditional viewers prefer.
The film is exactly what it advertises itself to be: a cheerful, sun-drenched, old-fashioned romantic comedy with two movie stars at peak charisma doing what movie stars are supposed to do. It revived a genre Hollywood had given up on. It did $220 million worldwide. It proved that audiences will go to theaters to see attractive people fall in love if you cast the right people and trust the story. That sounds obvious. Apparently Hollywood needed reminding.
RT Critics: 67%. RT Audience: 84%. IMDB: 6.1. Box Office: $220M worldwide on $25M budget. The critics were mixed. The audience loved it. The ratio of budget to gross tells you everything you need to know about whether this movie worked.
Woke Tropes & Content Analysis
Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier
🔴 Woke Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diverse Supporting Cast | 1 | High | Low | 0.35 |
| Female Lead Rejecting Traditional Path | 2 | Moderate | Moderate | 2 |
| Premarital Sex Normalized | 2 | High | Moderate | 1.4 |
| TOTAL WOKE | 3.8 | |||
🟢 Traditional Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heterosexual Romance as Central Story Engine | 4 | High | High | 5.04 |
| Marriage as Aspirational Framework | 3 | High | Moderate | 2.1 |
| Classic Courtship Pattern | 3 | High | High | 3.78 |
| Emotional Honesty as Path to Union | 2 | High | Moderate | 1.4 |
| TOTAL TRADITIONAL | 12.3 | |||
Score Margin: +8.6 TRAD
Director: Will Gluck
MODERATE. Gluck is an apolitical commercial filmmaker. His career output, Easy A (2010), Friends with Benefits (2011), Annie (2014), Peter Rabbit (2018), Anyone But You (2023), is entirely focused on crowd-pleasing entertainment. He has no significant public political footprint. He is a producer and director who succeeds when he finds the right star combination and gets out of their way, which is exactly what happened here.Will Gluck is a Los Angeles-born writer-director whose career began in television before breaking through with Easy A (2010), the Emma Stone vehicle that revived the high school comedy. His follow-up Friends with Benefits (2011) starred Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake and cemented his reputation for breezy, commercially savvy romantic comedies. A detour into family films with Annie (2014) and two Peter Rabbit films was profitable but unremarkable. Anyone But You represents a return to his core strength: R-rated romantic comedies built around charismatic lead performances. The film's $220 million worldwide gross on a $25 million budget was the biggest commercial win of his career and was widely credited with reviving the theatrical rom-com, a genre studios had largely abandoned for streaming. Gluck's directorial voice is comfortable and unobtrusive. He knows how to frame beautiful people in beautiful locations and trust the material.
Writer: Ilana Wolpert and Will Gluck
Ilana Wolpert wrote the original screenplay based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, with Gluck collaborating on rewrites. The adaptation is loose, updating Benedick and Beatrice to Ben and Bea, transferring the setting from Messina to Sydney, and replacing the war-hero context with Goldman Sachs and Boston University law school. The Shakespearean bones are intact: two witty people who profess to hate each other are maneuvered into admitting their love by the people around them. The false revelation scene, where each overhears the other being described as secretly in love with them, is faithfully preserved. Wolpert's original contribution was identifying that the Much Ado premise maps cleanly onto modern hookup culture, where the reason someone leaves after a first night can be completely misread and become the source of long-lasting mutual resentment. The screenplay does what it needs to do. It is not profound, but it is professionally constructed and gives its leads room to work.
Content Breakdown
Adult Viewer Insight
Conservative adults can watch Anyone But You with minimal concern. The film's core value proposition is exactly what you think it is: a man and a woman who belong together finally getting out of their own way. The R rating is for language and one understated sexual scene. The ideological content is essentially zero. The supporting diversity is background casting with no messaging attached. If your objection is to premarital sex depicted on screen, this film has it, tastefully. If your objection is to Hollywood telling you that men and women should not fall in love with each other, this film vigorously disagrees with that premise. It is the most traditional story you can tell, given a professional modern execution by two stars at the peak of their appeal.
Parental Guidance
Rated R for language and brief sexual content. Recommended for ages 16 and up. Adults having consensual sex after a romantic arc is depicted non-explicitly. Moderate strong language throughout. Social drinking as constant backdrop. No violence, drug use, or political messaging. The story is fundamentally about romantic honesty and commitment, which is good territory for mature teen discussion.
Is Anyone But You Safe for Kids?
Rated NR. Anyone But You is a romantic comedy featuring language that includes frequent profanity, with multiple uses of strong expletives throughout. Sexual content is present and moderately explicit, including several scenes with nudity and sexual situations depicted on screen. Some scenes contain crude sexual humor and references. Violence is minimal, consisting only of minor physical comedy and a few brief scuffles that are played for laughs with no serious injury or blood. Alcohol and drug use appear in social settings, including scenes of characters drinking at parties and bars, though drug use is limited to incidental background references. The film contains some marijuana references but no graphic depiction of drug use. This film is best suited for mature teenagers and adults due to the combination of explicit sexual content and frequent profanity. The movie's humor and romantic storyline are geared toward audiences aged 16 and older who can process adult themes appropriately. Younger viewers may find some content inappropriate or confusing. Parents considering this film for their teenagers should be aware of the sexual scenes and language before deciding on its suitability for their household. The traditional-leaning themes emphasize romantic relationships and commitment despite some modern comedic elements.
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