star with films like Speed and Miss Congeniality, Bullock has since had a long and successful career starring in everything from romantic comedies to big-budget action blockbusters. With successful movies like The Heat, The Proposal, The Blind Side, Gravity, and Bird Box on her resumé, Bullock has shown that she really can do it all and she continues to be a strong box office pull for audiences.
Bullock's next movie, The Lost City, sees her playing a romance novelist who finds herself on a jungle adventure after getting caught up in a kidnapping plot. In addition to Bullock, the film also stars Channing Tatum as a book cover model and Daniel Radcliffe as a wealthy elite determined to find a mythical lost city at any cost. Initial trailers for The Lost City tease plenty of laughs, lots of action, and an unlikely romance.
In a new interview with NY Times, Bullock, having starred in a number of romantic comedies over the course of her career, explains why big-budget versions of those films just don't seem to get made anymore. What it comes down to, she explains, is that the romantic comedy, as a genre, became devalued. like "chick flick" became synonymous with formulaic and predictable movies that were aimed specifically at women. Historically, however, as Bullock explains, movies that had comedy and romance were not marginalized in the same way. Check out Bullock's full comment below:
"Because they were bastardized and so undervalued — anytime someone said 'chick flick' or 'rom-com,' it was just disparaging. But when you go back to the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, anything with a base of comedy and adventure that also had romance in it wasn’t marginalized the way that it is now. I think when everything swung toward the very masculine action-adventure, women got relegated to the arm piece or damsel in distress. Then, when rom-coms came up, it was always like, 'Oh, we’re going to let the women come back in, but it’s going to be this formula that we like, and it can’t be too edgy.'"
Of course, the romantic comedy as a genre is not actually dead. While fifteen years ago romantic comedies like The Proposal were made with big budgets, big stars, and were released theatrically, now, romantic comedies are relegated almost entirely to streaming. Streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon Prime still release romantic comedies semi-regularly but they are almost always made on relatively low budgets with smaller stars. What Bullock seems to be getting at is that, over time, "romantic comedy" stopped referring to movies that featured both romance and comedy, but instead came to be associated with somewhat trashy entertainment (produced mostly by men), which was aimed at a female audience.
The Lost City, while also seemingly featuring a lot of action elements, could technically fall under the "romantic comedy" umbrella. The film features both romance and comedy but would appear to be a far cry from the formulaic "rom-coms" of the mid-2000s. If The Lost City is a hit, it might help to separate the term romantic comedy from its somewhat negative connotations and remind audiences that films can feature romance and comedy without being formulaic or predictable. The Lost City is scheduled to hit theaters on March 25.
Source: NY Times
