Anyone but You, writer/director/producer Will Gluck’s crappy modernization of “Much Ado About Nothing” that fervently insists the mid ‘00s never ended, we just got smartphones, was so successful during its first run that Sony pushed out a Feb. 9 re-release with a little extra content.

This re-release would be embarrassing if anyone found out about it – the film was still in its initial run, adding only 186 theaters for the “re-release” in total, and other than that, the numbers look like nothing changed. It dropped 23.2% that, and it had been dropping close to 25% every weekend since the Christmas season ended. It didn’t even change positions, moving from no.7 at the box office the weekend of Feb. 2 to no. 7 at the box office the weekend of Feb. 9.

A round of applause for Sony Pictures.

I say Anyone but You is crappy, and it is, but that’s not to sound ungrateful. This is a lazy, fun little film that brings a surprising jolt of a lot of things that have been missing from the screen for several years. Its surprising success speaks to how beloved so many aspects of the film remain and how simple making money with a film can be.

Sydney, summer- When two mutual friends get engaged, Bea and Ben (Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell) take their “merry war” with them to a destination wedding in Australia, where the compacted bundles of the Boston winter give way to confident swimsuits and carefree smiles. The pair had hooked up months beforehand, each thinking they were jilted by the other. The brides-to-be worry the former lovers will ruin everything, but with Ben watching his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend together and Bea hiding from her family that she left her fiancé and dropped out of law school, they decide to fake a relationship between themselves to deflect attention – all while hiding their true feelings, that they both enjoyed that hookup and wanted to see each other again, from each other, as well.

Anyone but You, a Sony product, is a destination movie – like the destination wedding it depicts, it’s a thinly veiled excuse to light off to Sydney for a monthlong party. Sony’s been doing that for its cheaper films recently – the second Sonic the Hedgehog movie, for instance, wouldn’t have happened if Olive Garden hadn’t paid for the whole crew to spend several weeks in Hawaii.

Gluck and the two leads signed on for an untitled rom-com in January 2023 and they were in New South Wales the next month, so while he may be a “Much Ado About Nothing” die hard, it seems more likely he got the contract, immediately pulled down his copy of “Collected Works” and clattered out a modernization in a week or two and encouraged his actors to improvise. There are a couple of points where someone doesn’t seem to know their lines, but it’s breezed past while maintaining the same mood, so you get the specific sense that the words themselves aren’t all that important, which is ironic and quite freeing for a Shakespeare adaptation. By contrast, they’ll whip out some of the Bard’s lines to declare love, most pointedly Claudia and Halle (Alexandra Shipp and Hadley Robinson) for their wedding vows. You can tell because it’s always accompanied by a joke about having come up with it on the spot. The first half of the play centering around Claudia and Halle’s courtship has been removed, cutting the cast by about half and leaving the marketing focus heavy on Sweeney and Powell.

The film keyed Sweeney’s sudden rise in pop-culture, though she’s already had two more movies release in 2024. True sex symbols, actresses whose films are advertised on their attractiveness first and talent second, sputtered out in step with the ‘90s rom-com, and that’s the biggest shock Anyone but You presents. This movie wants you to look at Sweeney and Powell and imagine them doing it. Its marketing is about getting you to think about them doing it, and promising to show you them doing it within boundaries.

R-rated for “brief graphic nudity” boundaries, but that’s overselling it. This could have been PG-13 with maybe a single shot removed – or at least, the initial release could have, and I didn’t watch the extended version because it isn’t a good enough movie to sit through again.

The biggest problem with Anyone but You, and this what gives away the actual intent behind the project, is how frequently it drops into filler montages of people getting ready for the day and parties passing by with nothing important happening – because obviously the way they shot it was having an actual party and shooting whatever they could. There’s too many, they’re too long and they’re propping up a movie that’s too thin to be supported by them.

They stop me from recommending Anyone but You, but at the same time, what’s in those montages is what’s been missing, and what viewers have been responding to – beautiful people in the sun, happy, scantily clad and relaxing on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation. Sure, there’s drama, but no one’s afraid for their lives. The multiverse isn’t in jeopardy, there are no skybeams or giant monsters wreaking havoc. The worst thing that could happen here is the main characters having a bad time.

The sexy, funny high schoolers who fall in and out of love a little too easily of 10 Things I Hate About You and other loose Shakespeare adaptations from the mid ‘00s are 20 years older – they’re movie stars, so they look the same age – and now they’re having a destination wedding. There’s the same reliance on Shakespeare’s work for the same reasons and to the same effect – to use the tropes he established, which are so universal they remain easy shorthand centuries later, to quickly turn around a resonant story.

Anyone but You is low-quality and easily forgettable, but it’s a fun thing to forget about, an easy-going little movie about people being people. It doesn’t come recommended in any way, but I’m glad I saw it.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.