There’s Only One Kind of Movie You Should Be Watching on a Plane. A Perfect One Just Came Out.
Earlier this week, Anyone but You, the romantic comedy starring Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney and professional handsome man Glen Powell, crossed $100 million at the international box office. That’s an impressive feat for the midsize movie, which cost $25 million to make but initially opened to disappointing ticket sales when it was released around Christmas. Its slow-building success means it’s now become the highest-grossing R-rated rom-com since 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby.
Anyone but You, based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, is a lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers story in the vein of the classic early-aughts rom-coms that are now, sadly, startlingly rare. The promotional materials—a tonally bizarre trailer and lots of press-junket clips and paparazzi shots of Sweeney and Powell notably sizzling together—made the movie look fun enough. But I confess that I had no immediate desire to see it in the theater. When it comes to a film like Anyone but You, I have only one thought: I can’t wait to watch this on a plane.
Anyone but You joins a venerable category of films that are best watched on a small screen, at an altitude of 35,000 feet, surrounded by the rustling of strangers in too-close quarters. Plane movies, in other words. To be clear, I have nothing but admiration and respect for this category of movie. They’re never going to win prestigious awards, but they make for comforting content and fulfill an important public need by distracting us from the drudgery of airplane travel. (Take it from me: I am from Australia, and any flight back to see family from my home in New York City requires me to watch enough plane movies to fill the Library of Congress.)
What constitutes the perfect plane movie? There are several important criteria, but I’ll start with the most obvious: A good plane movie often features at least one scene that is actually set on a plane. It’s a funny requirement, but one that I think is important for helping us connect with the subject matter at hand: If I’m stuck in this tin can, you should be too. In Anyone but You—which, fine, I ended up seeing alone at a Tuesday matinee screening for the purposes of this article—that takes the form of Sweeney’s character suggestive gymnastics (good physical comedy!) as she attempts to steal a cookie from Powell’s character, who is asleep in first class. In 2022’s Ticket to Paradise, a divorced couple played by Julia Roberts and George Clooney bump into each other on a flight to a destination wedding, a scene that is even highlighted in the movie trailer. The denouement of 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, arguably one of the most important plane movies of the past decade, takes place on yet another plane, with the two leads (Constance Wu and Henry Golding) reuniting as the flight is boarding.
It makes sense, then, that the next most obvious hallmark of a good plane movie is an element of travel. I don’t care if I’m boarding a plane to Muncie, Indiana; I want to watch a movie where the characters are going somewhere exotic and beautiful. In Anyone but You, it’s Australia. In Ticket to Paradise, it’s Bali. In Crazy Rich Asians, it’s Singapore. But the destination doesn’t always have to be warm or in the Asia Pacific region, for that matter. For example, 2006’s Last Holiday, starring Queen Latifah, is set in the Czech ski resort town of Karlovy Vary, the stuff of cozy fantasies.
Another thing these movies all have in common is that they take place over a short, limited time span. For many plane movie rom-coms, that tends to be a wedding week, but it could also just be a short vacation or a dayslong mission with a deadline. This isn’t the time for a 30-year epic. I want something short and snappy that will help take my mind off the fact that I am hurtling in a metal tube through the sky toward Muncie, Indiana. (Apologies to the good people of Muncie for the second punch down; I’m sure it’s a lovely place.)
Next, the performances. It’s not the acting that’s important in these movies; it’s the sense of escapism, the feeling of being distracted or transported briefly out of your seat placed disturbingly close to the restrooms at the back of the plane. Anyone but You’s supporting cast delivers some of the hammiest acting ever caught on film, but what matters is that I got the sense they were having fun while filming it. What arguably matters even more is that the stars are, well, hot. Sweeney and Powell aren’t exactly A-list household names (not yet, at least), but they’re both charming and cartoonishly hot enough for the copious amount of swimsuit scenes that Anyone but You demands. A plane isn’t the place to watch Charlize Theron in her convincingly rough Monster (2003) makeup; it’s the time to see her looking snatched as Madam Secretary in Long Shot (2019). If I’m wearing sweats and feeling crusty in the stale cabin air, I want to be reminded that beautiful people exist.
There’s an important caveat to that point, though: While our leads should be hot, a good plane movie shouldn’t feature extensive amounts of full frontal nudity or graphic sex scenes, lest you cause those sitting next to you to spit out the cheap wine that’s been doled out by harried flight attendants. You don’t want to end up like that older gentleman who was filmed having to fast forward midflight through that tender bottoming scene in last year’s Red, White, and Royal Blue. Airlines can and do censor some movies to make them appropriate as plane movies, but sometimes we as viewers have to make the call. Don’t worry, Anyone but You should be able to pass muster despite a steamy shower scene and a glimpse of Powell’s ass (although we can probably expect a close-up shot of an Australian surfer’s uncircumcised penis to get the air-marshaled chop).
Another important feature of the plane movie genre is some element of action. Whether that’s a car chase scene or a series of jaw-dropping stunts or a dramatic, yet comedic, helicopter rescue from the ocean (that would be in Anyone but You—not just once, but twice), what matters is that it’s a spectacle. Humans are simple creatures; throw an adrenaline-pumping, physics-defying piece of pageantry on screen, and we will hoot and holler. It doesn’t even have to have anything to do with romance—while several of the plane movie elements that I have described are more often found in rom-coms, the truth is that many action movies also meet the requirements I’ve laid out so far. As much as I expect the directors of those kinds of explosion-filled, macho-man films might chafe at the idea of us watching their expensive CGI scenes on a 10-inch screen with bad headphones, I wholeheartedly believe that the Bond movies, for example, make for wonderful plane movies, as do the Mission Impossible films. (Just no plane crash scenes, for obvious reasons.)
It’s here that we come to a paramount element of any plane movie: It can’t be something that requires my full attention. There’s probably going to be a distractingly loud baby crying nearby, or I’m going to be simultaneously half-watching the New Girl reruns playing on the screen of the passenger in front of me, or I might even fall asleep after the beverage cart comes around. This is not the environment for a meaty Holocaust drama; it’s the time for stupidity and low stakes.
The film studio executives know this, mind you. David Decker, president of content sales for Warner Bros. Discovery, told Vulture last year that airplane passengers tend to want to kick back and relax by watching what he called “lean-back” films, as opposed to “lean-in” ones. “A lean-back film is a action movie, a comedy, or something that doesn’t require an immense amount of concentration, and a lean-in title is one where you have to follow every scene and hang on really tight,” Decker said. “They’ll still work, but they’re not going to work as well in that environment.”
This is why the final and most important requirement of a plane movie is this: It should be predictable. You could tell, based on the poster alone, how Anyone but You is going to end. And that’s fine! In fact, that’s why I want to watch it on a plane. Amid a chaotic and stressful day of travel, when so many things can and do go wrong, I want my entertainment to be safe, reaffirming, and unsurprising. I want the good guys to win and the hot people to kiss. I want my plane movies to tell me that everything is going to be OK and that this is going to be over soon.
The existential irony of the plane movie, however, is that, funnily enough, for these kinds of safe, comforting, harmlessly mediocre films to exist for our eventual in-flight pleasure, Hollywood needs to see sufficient box-office returns to keep making them. As I sat in my matinee screening for Anyone but You, pondering this catch-22 of sorts (Catch-22 is, ironically, not at all a good plane movie), I felt gratitude to all of you (us) who put in the work by forking over $20 to see these movies in theaters so that everyone else can watch them as the cinema gods intended: on a tiny screen in a crowded cabin that smells of farts, hurtling in a metal tube through the sky toward Muncie.
