Julia Roberts: We Didn’t Fully ‘Appreciate’ the Romantic-Comedy Boom in the 1990s
variety.comZack Sharf Julia Roberts is returning to the romantic-comedy genre for the first time in over 20 years with the upcoming “Ticket for Paradise,” and she hopes audiences will finally appreciate the hard work that goes into making feel-good cinema.
Roberts dominated the genre in the 1990s with hits such as “Pretty Woman” (1990), “Notting Hill” (1999) and “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (1997).
The Oscar winner recently told The New York Times that she believes moviegoers didn’t appreciate the rom-com boom enough and all the hard work that went into it. “I think we didn’t appreciate the bumper crop of romantic comedies that we had then,” Roberts said. “You don’t see all the effort and puppet strings because it’s fun and sweet and people are laughing and kissing and being mischievous.” Roberts said of rom-coms, “This is a genre that I love to participate in and watch, and I think they are hard to get right.
There is a really simple math to it, but how do you make it special? How do you keep people interested when you can kind of predict what is coming?” It takes skill to answer those questions successfully, and Roberts suggested that skill is often taken for granted given how sweet and lighthearted rom-coms can be.
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