The Netflix film Your Place or Mine is a throwback to the old days of rom-com glory and tells of two best friends who arrive at the realisation that they are perfectly suited to one another on romantic terms. The film stars rom-com heroes Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher.
Lauren Neustadter, president of film and TV of Witherspoon’s media company, told Variety of the film, “What we always intended to make was a really premium romantic comedy that would resonate with an audience that wanted to watch a movie that would bring them joy.”
She added, “People love Reese and Ashton in this type of movie, so that’s an exciting thing to see them together. I don’t think the audience went away. It’s just movie studios became more interested in four-quadrant event films, and rom-coms got lost.”
Aline Brosh McKenna, the film’s writer and director, who previously wrote The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses, said, “I’ve decided to see this as an exciting new frontier. There’s no point in being nostalgic for the old way of releasing movies. Instead, I’m embracing the new world. I’ve been doing this since 1991, and I feel like I’ve gotten astute about seeing who is in the mood to tell these stories, and in Netflix, I found a place hungry for them.”
Evidently, McKenna feels that Netflix was the perfect place for her to bring rom-coms back into the audience’s hearts. “For people in my genre, that Sunday after your movie opened was very nerve-racking,” she added. “It’s fun to have a packed house seeing your film, but it was just becoming so difficult. And the reality is that a lot of people like to watch these movies at home with their friends and family.”
She concluded, “I want to be able to show people that there is an audience for these movies. It’s not a gut feeling. There are metrics. Until the decision tree at movie studios looks like the population at large, which it still doesn’t, all underserved groups of folks will have to be able to point to data to change minds.”
