Ana Carballosa/Netflix
This disparity between critics’ responses and the volume of viewers still deciding to go ahead and watch this film anyway is just a part of our modern streaming life. Would you get up, get dressed, get on a bus, buy a ticket and sit in a cinema for three hours to watch Office Romance? Probably not. Will you press play while you sit in your pyjamas hoovering Chilli Heatwave Doritos and scrolling for houses you’re not going to buy on RightMove? Yep. Similarly, last month’s Ladies First, Netflix’s attempt at feminist subversion – a sort of What Women Want for a 2026 dystopia – starring Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike, was roundly panned by critics, but still hit the top of the streamer’s charts. And so we find ourselves here: firmly in our rom-com slop era.
The market for rom-coms is still huge – of course it is. There is a cross-generational hunger for new content to feed us in the way that Clueless, When Harry Met Sally and Mean Girls once did. As it stands, we’re stuck with poor JLo playing opposite a prosthetic boner, and sort of interchangeable streaming offerings such as People We Meet On Vacation and Picture This. The jarring thing is, perhaps, the hope we have along the way. Office Romance started out, as a lot of modern rom-coms do, looking extremely promising on paper. It had JLo in a triumphant return to the genre which we know and love her in! It had Goldstein, a comedy powerhouse! It had Ol Parker in the director’s chair – he directed Mamma Mia 2! This is going to be great, we thought. Goldstein, who also wrote and produced Office Romance, even acknowledged that the rom-com scene is in dire straits these days. “We felt like we hadn’t seen a great one in a long time,” he said in an interview. “We were both like, ‘Who’s your dream person to make a rom-com with?’ Without hesitation, we were both like, ‘JLo, because she’s the best rom-com actor.’ So we decided to write one for her.”
Disappointment has become something rom-com fans are used to – so much so it has now turned into acceptance that the golden age of the rom-com, with its How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days and Notting Hill, is firmly in the rearview mirror with not much coming along to replace it. There have been some exceptions, with films like last year’s Materialists and Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy offering some genuine substance. They were also, however, perhaps too poignant to exist in the rom-com genre at all, covering such topics as dead husbands and sexual assault. The biggest rom-com success story of recent years, 2023’s Anyone but You, starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, grossed over $220 million worldwide, with many deeming it proof that theatrical rom-coms could still succeed. (I could, however, write a separate thesis on the fact that electric chemistry, à la McConaughey and Hudson, is the one factor that the modern rom-com lacks, and Powell and Sweeney would be my first subjects.)
