Anyone but You

Anyone but You is a 2023 American romantic comedy film directed by Will Gluck, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ilana Wolpert. Loosely based on Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, it stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. The supporting cast includes Alexandra Shipp, GaTa, Hadley Robinson, Michelle Hurd, Dermot Mulroney, Darren Barnet, Bryan Brown, and Rachel Griffiths.
Anyone but You premiered in AMC Lincoln Square Theater on December 11, 2023, and was released theatrically in the United States by Sony Pictures Releasing on December 22, 2023. The film received mixed reviews from critics and emerged a sleeper hit, grossing $220 million worldwide. This success was seen as the return of romantic comedies to theaters.
Bea, a law student at Boston University, meets Goldman Sachs employee Ben at a coffee shop. The two have an instant connection and spend the day together, ultimately falling asleep on Ben's couch. She leaves without waking him in the morning but quickly reconsiders. When she returns to the apartment, she overhears Ben insulting her while talking to his friend Pete. Not realizing that he is incredibly hurt by her disappearance, Bea leaves.
Bea and Ben cross paths again six months later when Bea's sister, Halle, begins dating Pete's sister, Claudia. The two are frosty with each other, each blaming the other for their date ending poorly. Halle and Claudia get engaged and plan their wedding in Sydney.
Bea, who has broken up with her fiancé Jonathan and secretly dropped out of law school, is dismayed to find that she and Ben are both on the same flight to Sydney and will both be staying at Claudia and Pete's parents' house in the days leading up to the wedding. Their disdain for each other frustrates the other members of the wedding party, compounded by the appearances of both Bea's and Ben's exes, Jonathan and Margaret, respectively.
The attendees devise a plan to get Bea and Ben together to ensure the wedding goes smoothly. Bea sees through the scheme and makes a deal with Ben to pretend that they are together in order to both make Margaret jealous and stop Bea's parents pushing her to reconcile with Jonathan. Early efforts to sell the relationship are unsuccessful until a party on a boat, where Bea and Ben dance together and reenact a scene from Titanic, which ends in Bea falling into Sydney Harbour. Ben jumps in after her; while waiting for rescue on a buoy, she tells him that she has withdrawn from law school, and they make a date to sightsee at the Sydney Opera House. They return to the house and have sex, but Bea suggests offhandedly that her recent actions have all been mistakes, which disappoints Ben. He slips away in the morning, disheartening Bea.
The morning of the wedding, Ben indirectly reveals to Bea's parents that she has quit law school, leaving her feeling betrayed. After overhearing Halle and Claudia arguing, Ben convinces Bea to pretend to reconcile for the sake of the wedding. The ceremony goes smoothly, but Bea sees Margaret kissing Ben and leaves in tears, heading to the Opera House. However, Ben rejects Margaret and says that he no longer has feelings for her. The wedding guests convince him to chase after Bea, so he jumps off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean, then convinces the rescue helicopter to fly him to the Opera House.
Ben tells Bea that he left because he feared their relationship could become another regret; Bea in turn tells him that spending the night with him was the first thing she has not regretted in a long time. They reconcile and return to the reception as a couple, where Halle and Claudia reveal that their argument was a ruse to push the two together. Meanwhile, Jonathan and Margaret get together.
It was announced in January 2023 that Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell would star in the then-untitled film to be directed by Will Gluck. Alexandra Shipp, Michelle Hurd, Bryan Brown, Darren Barnet and Hadley Robinson joined the cast in February, with the additions of Dermot Mulroney, Rachel Griffiths and GaTa announced the following month. In October 2024, The Hollywood Reporter reported, citing an anonymous source, that Sweeney had agreed to first play a supporting role in Madame Web in order to get Anyone but You made.
Filming began in New South Wales in February 2023. In May, the film was titled Anyone but You. The movie was filmed in various locations across Sydney, including the Sydney Opera House, Marks Park in Bondi, Palm Beach, Jones Bay Wharf, the Queen Victoria Building, and Barrenjoey Lighthouse.
During production, a scene involving a rescue helicopter almost went wrong due to mechanical issues, requiring an emergency landing. In an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Sweeney revealed another incident that had happened during production; while filming the spider scene, the trained huntsman spider that was used actually bit her.
The film's score was produced by Este Haim and Chris Stracey. The film's title track was released by Still Woozy. Natasha Bedingfield's "Unwritten" is prominently featured throughout the film.
Anyone but You premiered at AMC Lincoln Square Theater in New York City on December 11, 2023, and was released by Sony Pictures Releasing in the United States and Canada on December 22, 2023. In response to the success at the box office, Sony Pictures released an extended version of the film in theaters on February 9, 2024, ahead of Valentine's Day.
Anyone but You was released on digital platforms on February 20, 2024, and on Blu-ray on March 12, 2024.
Anyone but You grossed $88.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $131.7 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $220 million. Deadline Hollywood calculated the net profit of the film to be $103 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues. As of 2024, it is the highest-grossing Shakespeare film adaptation.
In the United States and Canada, Anyone but You was released alongside Migration, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and The Iron Claw, and was projected to gross around $7 million from 3,055 theaters in its four-day opening weekend. The film made $3.5 million on its first day, including $1.2 million from Thursday night previews. It went on to debut to $6.3 million, finishing fourth at the box office. In its second weekend the film made $8.8 million, finishing fifth at the box office. In its third weekend the film made $9.5 million (an increase of 9%), finishing fifth again, before making $7.1 million and finishing in fourth the following week.
The film received mixed reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 54% of 115 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.6/10. The website's consensus reads: "Slick direction and a pair of tremendously watchable stars make Anyone But You a passably fizzy diversion despite a less than scintillating story." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 52 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it an average of four out of five stars, with 57% saying they would definitely recommend the film.
Drew Gillis of The A.V. Club gave the film a B– grade, writing, "No one goes into a movie like Anyone But You for realism, nor should they. The film is made as fun escapism, and it succeeds at that. It's aspirational, but not in the Gossip Girl way of name-dropping designers and outwardly flexing their wealth." Common Sense Media's Tara McNamara gave it 3/5 stars and wrote, "thanks to the casting of appealing actors, the presence of Natasha Bedingfield's 'Unwritten' throughout the film, and the characters' new-adult-accurate dialogue... Gluck's end result is diverting enough that teens and young adults are highly unlikely to notice its flaws." The Hindu's Mini Anthikad-Chhibber said the film was "not wildly inventive", but was "powered by Sweeney and Powell's charisma, with able support from Brown and Hurd, eye candy thanks to Barnet... and laughs from Davidson."
The Guardian's Benjamin Lee gave the film 2/5 stars, writing, "Director Will Gluck... can't turn his leads into more than swimwear models, centring a romcom around them is like watching a kid force two dolls to kiss." David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter said, "neither screen chemistry nor laughs can be manufactured, especially not with the kind of pedestrian writing in Will Gluck's Anyone But You, which does nothing to reanimate the moribund studio rom-com." Robert Moran of The Age gave it 2.5/5 stars, writing, "Watch the movie; there's no way these guys hooked up. Whatever sparkling chemistry we thought we saw in the film's immaculate PR drip-feed, it's barely there in the final product."