An important quality that places a romance movie/romantic comedy as one of the best of all time is when the two leads have astounding chemistry. Flicks like The Notebook and Titanic would be my picks for having the strong sparks between two characters. Then there are love stories fans just aren’t buying due to the lack of on-screen chemistry portrayed. Movie fans have their own opinions on which romantic movies have leads with “zero chemistry," and I have to say that I'm in agreement with some of these picks.
There’s nothing that ruins a romance film more than when the film’s two leads aren’t making an impression showing they’re in love. On Reddit, one movie fan made their picks on romance films with "zero chemistry" such as You People, Fifty Shades of Grey, Ghosted, and more. This fan asked other Reddit users what their picks would be and they had plenty of their own choices.
The first major pick was Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening playing a married couple battling the deadly toxins of plants and trees. One user gave a hilarious response to what they thought watching the two in the sci-fi thriller:
I LOVED this movie as a kid. Who knows why. But I always thought they were good friends who just adopted kids and lived together at the end 💀😭
Talk about a major burn. That really says something if their relationship came out platonic-looking. I couldn’t even buy any of their emotional scenes together.
Another comment spoke about Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon in Your Place or Mine (which can be found with your Netflix subscription). Fans found the duo to be “boring” with hardly any intimacy shown “through the first 10 minutes.” This rom-com pick doesn’t come off as surprising to me. Critics were split over the chemistry of the two leads who weren’t even sharing screen time for the majority of the movie. What was even more cringe was their awkward red carpet photos together where they looked like they didn’t know what to do with themselves. However, Kutcher explained the awkwardness came from being hard of hearing in one ear and not knowing where to look as people were calling his name.
The Harry Potter movies may not be rom-coms, but Reddit users found fault with the pairing of Harry and Ginny.
Dan Radcliffe and Bonnie Wright together were so awkward, and it didn’t help that the screenwriters gave them such weird interactions (the “open up, you” and the shoelace-tying scenes give me so much secondhand embarrassment).
I’m on the same page with this Reddit user. In the books and the movies, I found the two characters from the J.K. Rowling series to be an odd pairing. Of all of the women The Boy Who Lived ended up with, I never thought he’d want to get with his best friend’s sister. Talk about violating the bro code. But Ginny’s character in the movies came out as “disappointing” due to her lack of screen time, so maybe if she could have gotten more scenes throughout the books and the films, more people would be sold on the Hogwarts students eventually becoming a married couple.
Other movie fans mentioned included Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez in The Fast Saga, Henry Cavill and Amy Adams in Man of Steel, Pierce Brosnan and Denise Richards in The World Is Not Enough, and more. I do find it funny that people on Reddit are arguing about Anne Hathaway and Chris Pine being on this list for The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. While I felt the two had chemistry in the movie, I wish the characters of Mia and Nicholas had more development. Not to mention, I still ship her with Michael from the first film.
Reddit users had a lot of interesting picks for their movies that lacked the romantic chemistry we should have gotten. It can really ruin the fun of watching a romance story if the film’s two leads just don’t sell their love story to us. If you’re interested in the latest romance films coming out this year, check out our 2024 movie schedule.
