Anyone But You is a rom-com that understood the assignment was chemistry first and plot a distant second, and it's better off for it. Will Gluck loosely reworks Much Ado About Nothing — down to a wedding-cake shop named Dogberry's — but the Shakespeare is scaffolding, not the point. The film is built around watching two people who are clearly attracted to each other perform hatred badly in front of a wedding party, and Gluck stages that tension through big, sun-drenched Australian set pieces (a boat trip, a hike, a disastrous skinny-dip) that give the leads physical business to play against their sniping dialogue.
Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell are doing something trickier than typical rom-com leads: playing characters who are performing a fake relationship on top of a real one they're actively denying, which means every scene operates on two levels of deception at once. Powell in particular has a gift for comic overselling — his Ben commits to ridiculous bits (a shirtless entrance, a cover of a Robyn song) with the specific confidence of someone who knows exactly how dumb he looks and does it anyway. Sweeney matches him by playing Bea's hostility as actual wounded pride rather than as generic rom-com prickliness, which is what makes the eventual thaw land.
Two people who can't stand each other, one wedding, zero chance of that holding.
The film's off-screen buzz became inseparable from its marketing: Sweeney and Powell leaned into persistent real-life dating speculation during the press tour, a strategy Powell later credited to Sweeney's instinct for how to sell a movie built on will-they-won't-they tension. Production wasn't without its hazards — Sweeney was bitten by a spider on camera during filming, and Powell found himself dangling from a helicopter with mechanical trouble above Sydney Harbour, the kind of behind-the-scenes chaos that ended up matching the film's own escalating-disaster sense of humor.
Critics were cooler than audiences, with Rotten Tomatoes settling around the mid-50s percent while general moviegoers turned it into a legitimate sleeper hit, grossing roughly $220 million worldwide against a modest budget — a rare theatrical rom-com success in an era when the genre had largely migrated to streaming. Its afterlife on streaming proved even more telling than its theatrical run, repeatedly climbing back into global top-10 charts on Netflix months after release. That staying power turned it into a case study for studios wondering whether original, star-driven romantic comedies could still justify a theatrical release, rather than skipping straight to a streaming premiere.
Part of what turned this into a genuine theatrical comeback story was a 20-year-old pop song. Natasha Bedingfield's 2004 hit "Unwritten" recurs throughout the film and gets a full cast singalong over the end credits, and audiences leaving screenings started filming themselves singing it in theater lobbies, a TikTok trend that racked up tens of thousands of posts. On-demand streams of the song jumped more than 150% in the days after release, pushing it back onto the charts two decades after it first hit, and Bedingfield herself publicly thanked fans for turning her song into a viral moment all over again. It's a rare case of a movie's soundtrack choice becoming as much a marketing engine as the stars' own press tour.
