Back in the 1990s, films often found their audiences on home video. That was certainly the case for Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, which didn’t do much in the way of business at the box office and wasn’t particularly well received by critics at the time either.
Nevertheless, people eventually discovered the movie, and it became an outright cult classic, spawning a made-for-TV prequel film and even a musical as audiences warmed to David Mirkin’s charmingly offbeat comedy about a pair of best friends (played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow) who start to feel like failures when they get an invite to their high school reunion and decide to lie about their successes instead.
So, 30 years later, should the movie’s long-awaited sequel also go directly to homes and bypass theaters? No, but that’s exactly what’s being planned for it, with THR confirming that not only is filming underway on Romy and Michele 2, but it will stream exclusively as a Hulu Original on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ internationally.
This is clearly a business decision that made sense to someone at 20th Century Studios. Someone will have sat at a big, fancy desk in an office somewhere at some point, telling a small group of gathered suits that Romy and Michele 2 won’t make any money with a theatrical release, and the best possible option is to dump it on streaming. I wasn’t in that meeting because I’m a normie who writes words on the internet, but because I get to write words on the internet without risking large sums of money in Hollywood, I’m about to tell those people why they’re probably wrong.
Yes, the first movie was a box office disappointment, but the people who originally grew to love it are now middle-aged adults, one of the only groups still happy to turn out for movies that appeal directly to them. Why are studios happy to spend around $200 million on a Masters of the Universe film after the 80s version flopped, but baulk at a theatrical release for a movie that has a relatively tiny budget in comparison? Romy and Michele 2 absolutely won’t do Avengers: Endgame-level numbers, but it doesn’t need to! It just needs to make a decent profit on that smaller budget, which seems entirely doable. Instead, the studio behind it has placed its importance solely on streaming subscriber acquisition and retention metrics.
Yet if it were only middle-aged people the new movie appealed to, you could probably tell me to do one. But Gen Z and Gen Alpha have also discovered Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. There have been plenty of TikTok fan edits doing the rounds over the years. It’s a cult classic that has remained one for anyone who has stumbled across it because it’s genuinely fun to watch and beats with a heart that fundamentally cries out “just be yourself!”
The original movie was full of lively fashion choices and concluded with the message that you should dress how you want, no matter what anyone else thinks. Are you going to tell me that the costumes and aesthetic of both movies wouldn’t appeal to people of all ages who want to make an event out of attending a screening? The first image from the sequel even suggests that Romy and Michele are still walking their own fashionable path. With studios often relying on social media influencers to do some of their marketing, they have plenty to work with here.
Studios also seem constantly baffled that movies largely marketed at women make money. In terms of sequels, The Devil Wears Prada 2 just grossed $664.2 million. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy notched approximately $140 million worldwide last year. And Greta Gerwig’s weird, $1.4 billion-grossing new take on Barbie? They forgot it! “More toy movies!” was the answer. They learn all the wrong lessons.
It’s not just the type of audience, either; it’s the genre. Somewhere along the way, studios simply decided that comedies belong on streaming. This has created a self-fulfilling cycle: audiences stop expecting comedies in theaters because studios stop releasing them there. And when they do? Well, let’s look at this month’s Scary Movie. It’s not even a good film, but it still did remarkable numbers. Freakier Friday could have also gone directly to streaming, but instead made about $94 million domestically. The surprisingly great legacy sequel The Naked Gun also did well at the box office.
But let’s step away from the money side of things, which will nearly always be the studio’s focus. Ultimately, the people who shared 1997’s Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, and who continue to share it, quote it, and talk about it like the cultural touchstone it actually was, deserve a chance to once again prove to studios that if we’re going to have belated sequels 30 years in the making, we’ll show up for them. This seems like a real missed opportunity to allow us the opportunity to do so.
