As Divergent author Veronica Roth pointed out in her opening of the “Romance: On the Big Screen: Why It’s About Damn Time” panel Friday at San Diego Comic-Con 2026, romance accounts for 23% of all book sales. So, while it may seem like the genre is having a moment on the big and small screens, it’s really always been a mainstay, and the entertainment industry is just loading up on what women audiences have wanted for a long time.
Roth moderated the panel, which included Christina Lauren author duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, The Love Hypothesis and Love, Theoretically author Ali Hazelwood, One and Only author Maurene Goo plus Magic Hour Entertainment co-founder Max Siemers and Rebelle Media co-founders Laura Lewis and Amanda Palley.
“Romance onscreen has, and when I say onscreen, I’m talking about the theatrical screen, has dropped over 75% the last 20 years,” Rebelle Media’s Laura Lewis said. “That audience hasn’t disappeared, and because of all the things that inspired us to get into the business — those Richard Curtis, Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron movies and TV shows — we want to bring them back. So that’s what’s inspiring us to get on these books.
Lewis’ partner Palley broke the news at the end of the panel that Rebelle Media has added Sarah Adams’ When in Rome series to their slate of book adaptations in development. The panel discussion revolved around the draw of romance, both in book form and tv and film form — whether adapted from novels or based on original screenplays — with insights from both authors and executives about how to get past the generic formula of putting a romance together. Most of the panelists favored leaning into specificity and the details that lovers of the genre latch onto while consuming a book, show or rom-com film.
“It’s a really cool genre to be a part of because it is written primarily by women, not exclusively [and] primarily for, but not exclusively for women,” Billings said of romance. “It is a genre that embraces diversity. It embraces queerness, embraces so many things, and it has so much cultural and socio-economic power.”
Billings and Hobbs, who have their book In a Holidaze coming to Netflix as a film adapted by Tiffany Paulson later this year, met 17 years ago sleeping on the sidewalk at the San Diego Convention Center waiting in line for the The Twilight Saga: New Moon panel featuring the cast of the then upcoming film. Reflecting on this anniversary, Billings commented on the growth of romance publishing’s presence at the convention.
Max Siemers, co-founder of the newly-formed Magic Hour Entertainment, which is now behind an adaptation of Christina Lauren’s Love & Other Words, broached the idea that certain times of year (likely Christmas and Valentine’s Day) provide windows to release romantic comedies and dramas set specifically around those holidays but with only really that as the framework.
“You get movies, and I’m not going to name movies, but there are movies that come out on certain platforms at certain periods of the year,” he said. “They all do really well, and because they do well, you have a lot of people thinking ‘Well, looks like we can still get viewers without having to try very hard with how we’re spending that money.’”
To that point, Billings commented on producers she’s worked with taking the time to see what fans love about a specific romance story versus going at it purely for the motivation of the baked-in book fanbase and anticipation for any level of adaptation of a title.
“When we’re talking to our producers, who are huge fans of the genre and really, really care about it as a genre. They go in and they read the comments. They see what you’re saying. They care what you guys want to see. They care who you want cast,” she said. “This is what’s really nice about this day and age of being an author. That talking about adaptations, for the first time, I feel like the people who are doing the adaptations are genuinely invested in the genre. They’re not just seeing, ‘How many eyeballs can we get?’”
In addition to observing that failure at the box office by a romance film trickling into the big screen trend at all for love stories in the past, Billings suggested where resources in a rom com could be devoted in order to get the core of a romance right: the chemistry.
“They need to capture the chemistry. I’m so not a movie maker, right? I don’t even know what word I should use there. But, as a viewer and a writer, what drives me crazy is that we have these huge budgets for sci-fi special effects or whatever it is,” she said. “The budget for romance needs to go to getting that tension right in the scene, giving enough time to the shot to make the two leads have that moment of eye contact or touch or whatever it is. That tension where you’re just, like, ‘Urgh, smash your faces together.’”
It’s chemistry, too, that is the “hook” studios are looking for, according to Rebelle Media’s Amanda Palley and Laura Lewis, who traced the care and investment translating to success in shows like Off Campus and Heated Rivalry, two titles dominating the romance conversation currently and the hockey subgenre. Siemers also brought up Voicemails for Isabelle as an example of a film with its fingers on the pules of dating life today.
“You can tell with Off Campus that the whole creative team cared so much about the genre. They were students of the genre. There’s so many nods to romantic in comedies in the past. You could tell they love it, and you could tell that with Heated Rivalry,” Lewis, whose Rebelle Media has an adaptation of Christina Lauren’s The Paradise Problem in the works, said. “[Romance] did become a commodity for so long, especially in theatrical film. It became more about, ‘What’s the hook? What’s the marketing angle?’ Not, ‘What’s the story?’ What’s been the hard part for us in Hollywood is we were having to fight those people who are like, ‘What’s the hook? What makes this theatrical?’ The hook is just chemistry and dialogue and people falling in love with that, and that’s really hard to sell up.”
Another key element needing more attention, Siemers emphasized, is the look of a romance film.
“There’s been — in the past five or six years — a lack of love and care to the visual aesthetic of these films. We all grew up on Nancy Meyers, and most people don’t realize, when Nancy Myers did the Parent Trap she hired the director of photography for Jurassic Park,’ Siemers said. “Little Giants was the same DP as Schindler’s List. They were hiring brilliant cinematographers and production designers, costume designers, and they really thought about color palette and how everything’s tied together.”
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Siemers, who, with Magic Hour Entertainment partner Tanner Anderson has Ali Hazelwood’s Love, Theoretically in development with Prime Video and Colleen Hoover’s Heartbones Entertainment, traced this to an example he felt was successful, the first To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018) film he worked on at Netflix, based on the book by Jenny Han.
“Our DP came in and was like, ‘We are going to shoot this like a John Peters film, or a Wes Anderson film, and the color palette is going to match the production design. It’s going to match the costumes, and this movie is going to look hyper specific,” Siemers said. “And it got to the point where, on the third To All the Boys movie, we were calling the Empire State Building to get the color palette of the Empire State Building in the background of our shots. So it’s about attention to detail and making sure these movies look as good as whatever you think a prestige movie looks like. There’s no reason [not to.]”
It’s more than just romance as a label that will attract viewers at this point.
“In the before times between Nancy Myers and the now, it would be people thinking, well, romance theaters or viewers don’t care about [details]. No one’s going to notice that. They just want to see people kissing,” Billings added. “Whereas it’s actually not true. We want to feel like we are watching an elevated version of these things that we love.”
Panelist and author Maurene Goo echoed a sentiment People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read author Emily Henry recently expressed: the desire of actors to go for leading man roles in romance.
“Glen Powell is smart for doing Anyone But You, to be honest, because Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, everyone back in the day did rom-coms, and it made them into movie stars,” she shared. “And I feel like a lot of male actors today are like, ‘I don’t want to do that’ because they have a negative association with it.”
Sometimes it comes down to availability for whichever actor is cast, Rebelle Media’s Amanda Palley added.
“If you have a director who can start on May first, and you have your dream actress who you’re so excited to play the female lead on May first, then you’ve got to look at the guys who are the right age, who are the right vibe, who can start on May first,” she said of the “inside baseball” factor in the industry.
“The casting process is very difficult. We’re making less movies and TV shows today than we were 10 years ago during the streaming boom. Studios are willing to spend less, and so when they want to spend, they have a certain caliber of actor in their mind,” Siemers said. “And when I say caliber, it changes at every studio. We can walk in thinking we have a [fit] in one studio, the other studio says ‘Meh.’ So it’s a very difficult thing when you get to a studio, and the studio is the one who greenlights the movie. Ultimately, it’s up to Paramount, it’s up to Universal, it’s up to Netflix if the movie gets actually made.
Added Siemers: “All we can do with our directors, with our writers, with our authors, and our producing partners, is to say ‘This is who we think creatively will be best for the movie,’ and sometimes those actors are at a level where the studio is okay with it, and sometimes they go, ‘No, here’s who we like, you pick from this list,’ and it becomes in their list.”
Palley, who brought up the idea of romances as “epic” in relation to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, pointed out the catch-22 of historical fiction and period pieces, where nobody wants to see devices or technology.
“Everyone says they’re looking for an epic romance. You know what is really really unepic? [When] people have their phones. So, we say ‘We have this book set in 1950,’ [and the response is] ‘No, no period. We don’t want period,’” Palley said. “And so it’s this weird dance of trying to figure out, ‘Okay, where out there is something that the people with all of the money will pay to create a movie that is epic, that is modern day, where nobody is using a device?”
Siemers joked that “they really just want a Kristin Hannah novel, and there’s only one Kristin Hannah.”
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