While small-screen romance has never been hotter thanks to the massive rise of Hallmark movies throughout the pandemic and the resulting wave of streaming originals that followed, romance in Hollywood hasn’t been at the top of the box office for a while. But thanks to Denis Villeneuve’s epic vision for Dune: Part 2, that could be changing. Sure, the biggest movie in the world is about war, spice, alien politics, and deep-space messiahs, but at the heart of the blockbuster smash hit is the soaring romance between Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya). With the success of this sprawling space-love story, maybe it’s a sign that the romance genre is making a big-screen comeback in a way we haven’t seen in some time.
The relationship between Paul and Chani has always been a key piece of Dune lore, and thus was an expected part of Dune: Part 2. But the way that Villeneuve shoots the lingering glances, musical sandwalking, and tented love sequences harkens back to the golden age of cinema. Films like Laurence of Arabia, An Affair to Remember, and even the more comedic dalliances of Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile come to mind. It helps that Zendaya and Chalamet have dynamic chemistry that makes theirs a romance we can root for, despite the inevitable tragedy to come. For Villeneuve, it was at the heart of the film. “It’s an action film, it’s a war movie, but it’s above all a love story,” he told Victoria News.
Dune: Part 2 and the romance at its center have awakened the 2024 box office like a sandworm rising from the sand, and it’s not the only blockbuster love story headed our way.
In Ryan Gosling’s upcoming stunt extravaganza The Fall Guy, you might well be expecting some impressive action, but what is perhaps less conventional is the fact that the film — which recently premiered at SXSW — is another sweeping romance that looks back to the glory days of Hollywood films like Roman Holiday just as much as contemporary action like John Wick. The latter is not a coincidence, as the film was directed by Wick co-creator David Leitch. But he, along with leading man Gosling, have been open about just how important the romantic aspects of the film are. “It’s such a love letter to stunts, a love letter to action, a love letter to filmmaking! It’s a love letter to the crew. And that love is at the heart of it. So we felt that it had to be that way from a story perspective as well.” Gosling told me in an interview for Den of Geek. It’s a bold gambit for Leitch, who has built his career on wild and often brutal action, but seeing as the film is also about a love of making movies, bringing the romance to the fore between Gosling and Emily Blunt’s characters makes sense.
Dune: Part 2 and the romance at its center have awakened the 2024 box office like a sandworm rising from the sand.
Another recent attempt to bring romance back to the big screen was the Sandra Bullock/Channing Tatum starrer The Lost City. Just like The Fall Guy, it premiered at SXSW — in 2022 — but thanks to the pandemic ended up quickly heading to streaming after a very successful if short box office run. Bullock plays a charming romance writer who’s losing her creative inspiration, while Tatum is the hunky model who poses for her covers. Together the pair are thrown into a rollicking action-adventure across the globe. Taking on a Romancing the Stone-esque premise and leading into the comedic aspects of the romance genre, The Lost City and its success — $192.9 million off a $68 million budget — hinted that there was still a space for romance in modern cinema, even in the more traditional (but not often successful in the modern box office) rom-com vein.
Even Matthew Vaughn’s recent flick Argylle dipped its toes into the romantic-action pond, once again looking to films like Romancing the Stone to play with viewers’ expectations and add another layer to the twist-filled spy drama. While the film wasn’t nearly as effective (or successful) as the sweeping and emotional romance of Dune 2, it’s proof that bigger Hollywood movies aren’t as afraid of embracing the genre which has been left behind in the dust of the superhero boom. And then there was Anyone But You, the recent straight-up-and-down rom-com starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell that became a slow-burn box office hit after an unassuming start. All of that is to say that romance is coming back in multiple forms and formats, and it feels like with Dune: Part 2 Hollywood is finally bringing back the sweeping action romance too.
Hopefully the immense success of Dune: Part 2 and the upcoming release of The Fall Guy means we might get more of these expansive, expressive, and exciting romance-centered films. There’s something so appealing in the way they feel like both a throwback to classic Hollywood but also a promise of something new and different, as Hollywood reshapes itself once again.
And if not, then at least we’ll always have Arrakis.
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Rosie Knight is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything from anime to comic books to kaiju to kids movies to horror flicks. She has over half a decade of experience in entertainment journalism with bylines at Nerdist, Den of Geek, Polygon, and more.
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