Archive
Eighteen pieces, six sections, one film
Everything published here, laid out in full. The section pages carry the same material with the pictures.
One film, start to finish
- A director hired for tone rather than authorshipRobert Luketic came to the film with a run of studio comedies behind him, and the job was calibration rather than signature.
- A score written to keep a comedy movingAaron Zigman's score does structural work — it tells the audience which scenes are the turn — and it is easy to miss for exactly that reason.
- An R rating changed how it could be soldThe MPAA rating shifted the marketing away from the broadest possible audience, which for this genre is a real cost.
Two leads at the top of a market
- A television lead crossing into film at the right momentKatherine Heigl arrived from a network drama into a run of studio comedies while the form was still reliably profitable.
- An action lead cast against what he was known forGerard Butler had come off historical action, and the casting works on the difference rather than in spite of it.
- The supporting cast is where the jokes actually sitJohn Michael Higgins and Cheryl Hines carry the running comic frame around the two leads, which is standard construction for the form.
Thirty-eight million against two hundred
- Thirty-eight million made roughly two hundredThe film cost about $38m and took around $205m worldwide, which is the ratio that kept the genre commissioned.
- The theatrical window was still long in 2009A mid-budget comedy in 2009 had months before home release, and the arithmetic depended on it.
- Comedy travels worse than action, and the split shows itDialogue comedy is the hardest genre to export, so the domestic-to-overseas split is the number worth reading.
The critics and the audience disagreed, measurably
- The audience graded it well above the criticsCinemaScore polls opening-night audiences and produces a grade that frequently diverges from aggregate critical scores. Here it did.
- A nomination is a marketing category tooThe Golden Raspberry nomination is part of the film's public record and says more about the genre's standing than the film.
- A marketing category that decided the reviewsThe 'chick flick' label set expectations before release and shaped how the film was written about.
Three writers, and what a rewrite does
- Three credited writers is a structure, not an accidentNicole Eastman, Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith share the credit, and the shape of a studio comedy rewrite is visible in the result.
- A writing partnership with a run behind itMcCullah and Smith had a documented run of studio comedies before this one, which is why they were brought on.
- The premise is a machine and it is meant to beThe setup — a producer and an on-air pundit forced together — is engineered to generate scenes, which is the craft rather than a failing.
The tradition it came out of, and the one it ended
- The newsroom comedy it is descended fromHis Girl Friday (1940) set the antagonistic-professionals template that this film is still working inside.
- Nora Ephron made the version everyone compares toWhen Harry Met Sally (1989) is the benchmark the genre is measured against, fairly or not.
- The mid-budget studio comedy stopped being madeAfter roughly 2013 the economics moved to franchises and streaming, and the budget band this film sat in largely disappeared.