Back in 2016, screenwriter Tiffany Paulsen moderated a panel about the fragile state of the romantic comedy, alongside genre devotees like Friends with Benefits writer-director Will Gluck, Man Up writer Tess Morris, and (500) Days of Summer co-writer Michael H. Weber. “We all said, ‘It’s going to come back!’” Paulsen recalled in an interview this week.
What may have been a bit of wishful thinking on her part—an optimism befitting rom-com heroines of the past, played by Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts—has proven true. Four years later, Paulsen’s own romantic comedy, Holidate, is sitting atop the Netflix charts—the latest in a string of light-hearted movies that have found success on the streaming service over the past few years. “People, it turns out, want to sit at home and watch romantic comedies,” she said.
To be fair, watching romantic comedies perhaps never really goes out of style. But it was Netflix that helped reinvigorate industry interest in the well-worn genre with the release of Set It Up and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before in 2018. That’s about when Paulsen began reworking a script she had written years prior. A short time later—and with support from McG’s production company, Wonderland—Paulsen heard Netflix was interested. “It just really took off from there,” she said of Holidate. “I like to say I’m a 15-year overnight success.”
An actress who appeared in Friday the 13th: Part VIII and The Runaway Bride, among other credits, Paulsen broke through as a writer with 2007’s Nancy Drew adaptation. After developing projects at a number of major studios, she wrote a sequel to 1987’s Adventures in Babysitting for Disney Channel. That film, the 100th Disney Channel Original Movie ever produced, was the highest-rated cable movie of 2016.
But by Paulsen’s own admission, creating teen and tween fiction was not her initial goal when she set out to become a writer. She was more of a Nora Ephron person, specifically a fan of When Harry Met Sally. “I always aspired to do something that was even just dipping a toe in being that perfect relationship movie with the sappy dialogue, those people that you just, of course, are dying to see end up together. I had longed to write something like that,” she said.
Directed by veteran filmmaker John Whitesell, Holidate is her stab at modernizing the Ephron blueprint. The film, with R-rated jokes about swallowing bodily fluids and hand jobs, tracks the budding relationship between Sloan (Emma Roberts) and Jackson (Luke Bracey) across a year of holiday parties and events. Spurred by her single and thriving aunt (a delightfully unhinged Kristen Chenoweth), Sloan convinces Jackson to be her “holidate,” a no-strings-attached companion to help get through the awkwardness of various holiday family gatherings as a single person. Through it all, the characters in the film are as conversant with romantic comedies as Paulsen is herself. “There’s always some fake reason the stars can’t be together when you know they’re going to be together from the poster,” Sloan tells Jackson on what amounts to their first date. Less than 90 minutes later, the pair make good on the promise of Holidate’s own poster, which naturally features its two stars.
“We know the ending of this movie,” Paulsen said plainly when asked how she set about both interrogating and embracing the genre’s tropes. “So how are you going to take the audience on a ride that is going to still surprise and delight us, and keep us on the edge of our seat a little bit? I’m certainly not the first person to invent the concept, but by calling it out a little bit, I think it kind of gives you some leeway to play around in the genre. Like, ‘Yeah, we know you know that we’re getting together at the end. But we’re going to still have a really good, fun, complicated messy time getting there.’”
And maybe even beyond. Holidate ends—spoiler alert!—with Sloan and Jackson heading to his native Australia after admitting their love for each other. Paulsen said she’s already got a sequel in mind.
“I know exactly what that story will be and how we would explore it,” she said. The sequel she has in mind would be set in Australia, and place Sloan in a fish-out-of-water scenario with Jackson’s extended family.
“I’m certainly hopeful,” she added. “We hope that people love it and want to see more of this relationship. I think there’s so much more to explore with Sloan and Jackson, because they’ve barely dated. They go on 11 dates in a year, and there’s a lot to see where this goes. So we’ll cross our fingers.”
She even has a title picked out. “Don’t you think Holimates is just a cute title?” she asked toward the end of our interview. “Holimates: Holidate Down Under.” As long as Roberts and Bracey are together on the poster, who could argue with that?
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