Sydney Sweeney’s Newest Movie Crosses Major Box Office Milestone

The best love stories take time. In Anyone But You, characters played by Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell only fall in love after spending quite a lot of time hating one another. At the box office, romantic comedy fans didn’t find Anyone But You right away, but the new film has gradually found an audience over the last five weeks and become an under-the-radar theatrical hit. Just this weekend, Anyone But You crossed $100 million at the worldwide box office.

Comedies have had a tough time in theaters over the last few years. R-rated romantic comedies have had an especially rough go of things, with 2016’s Bridget Jones’ Baby marking the last time one such film hit $100 million on the big screen. Anyone But You has flipped the script since its December release by allowing word of mouth to catch on.

Anyone But You didn’t come out of the gate swinging, but its first couple of weekends saw the film actually gain bigger audiences. That doesn’t happen often. Usually a movie’s weekend box office total will drop from week to week, and minimizing those drops is key to a film’s longterm theatrical success. Anyone But You saw the opposite in its first three outings, as each weekend delivered a bigger total than the last.

This weekend, the film’s fifth in theaters, saw its three-day earnings drop by just 14%. Anyone But You made around $16 million worldwide this weekend, helping cement its status as a genuine sleeper hit. The film has surprisingly out-earned Sony’s other R-rated rom-com from 2023, No Hard Feelings. The Jennifer Lawrence-starrer finished its box office run with just over $87 million and had a significantly higher budget.

“The success of Anyone But You has been led by the audience,” director Will Gluck told Blomberg in an email earlier this year. “They seem to have a great time watching it, feeling it, humming it — and have echoed this to their friends, family and social media. And there is no better marketing than that.”

You can check out the synopsis for Anyone But You below.

“In the edgy comedy Anyone But You, Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and Ben (Glen Powell) look like the perfect couple, but after an amazing first date something happens that turns their fiery hot attraction ice cold – until they find themselves unexpectedly thrust together at a destination wedding in Australia. So they do what any two mature adults would do: pretend to be a couple.”