We Stopped Making Love Stories. Now What?

In 2000, roughly one in three movies was a romance. By 2024, that number had fallen below one in ten.

Over the same period, 51 million romance novels were sold in a single twelve-month stretch—up 24 percent year on year. People haven't stopped wanting love stories. Hollywood has stopped making them. That gap is worth paying attention to.

What's Missing from the Screen

Netflix's new miniseries Vladimir arrived with real promise. Rachel Weisz plays a literature professor consumed by fixation on a younger colleague, played by Leo Woodall—two actors with genuine screen presence. What viewers got instead was a series of close-ups deployed as shorthand for desire: the character's calves, the folds of his neck, a cheap silver chain. The attraction never felt grounded in real longing. It felt like anxiety about aging and fading relevance projected onto a handsome blank.

Wuthering Heights and Love Story—the FX miniseries about Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr.—made similar promises and delivered similar disappointments. The most talked-about will-they-won't-they storyline of 2025 wasn't on screen at all. It was the real-life flirting between Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson during the Naked Gun press tour.

Music tells a parallel story. The number of hit love songs has dropped sharply since the 1990s, as artists gravitate toward sex, money, mental health, and self-actualization. And yet four of the five best-performing songs of 2025 were ballads or ballad-adjacent: Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars's "Die With a Smile," Kendrick Lamar and SZA's "Luther," Teddy Swims's "Lose Control," Billie Eilish's "Birds of a Feather." The industry keeps looking away from love. The audience keeps looking back.

The Exception That Proves the Rule

Then came Heated Rivalry—a sleeper hit about two closeted hockey players navigating mutual attraction over a decade. Minimal plot. Abundant sex scenes. And an audience response that bordered on collective relief.

The show's appeal is worth examining. Shane and Ilya meet as equals—no power differential, no wealth gap, no age dynamic. They like and respect each other. Their physical connection becomes, as critic Wesley Morris wrote, a gateway to emotional intimacy rather than a substitute for it. The sex isn't simply positive. It's love's gateway.

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The viewing public, particularly women, responded with something that looked less like enthusiasm than hunger. Because that kind of story—two people of equal standing, drawn together, made better by caring about each other—has become genuinely rare on screen. The list of on-screen couples from this century that have delivered comparable intensity is short: Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People, Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen in Pride and Prejudice, André Holland and Trevante Rhodes in Moonlight. That's roughly it.

What Fills the Void

Social scientist Alice Evans published a piece two years ago with a blunt thesis: romantic love is an underrated driver of gender equality. The logic is simple. Cultures that value love tend to invest in women's happiness, because loving someone generally involves caring about their wellbeing. Where marriage functions primarily as a mechanism for consolidating male power networks, love gets suppressed—and women's status follows.

The current data on gender attitudes is uncomfortable. A study by King's College London and Ipsos found that nearly a third of Gen Z men believe women should always obey their husbands. Among male Baby Boomers, that figure is 13 percent. A generation raised on Andrew Tate clips and hardcore pornography has, in measurable numbers, moved backward on gender equality relative to their grandparents. And it's not serving them: 44 percent of Gen Z men report no romantic relationships as teenagers, and the same proportion are unlikely to ever marry. The data on married men—healthier, happier, longer-lived—remains consistent.

Reese Witherspoon made a related argument on the podcast Armchair Expert: the decline of the romantic comedy has deprived two generations of on-screen examples of how relationships work. Rom-coms rely on formula and set unrealistic expectations, yes. But their absence has left a space that more extreme content has rushed to fill. As law professor Clare McGlynn writes in her forthcoming book Exposed, we have lost "the possibility of erotic material that celebrates pleasure without harm." Sexual content in popular movies fell by nearly 40 percent between 2000 and 2024—not because audiences lost interest, but because far more explicit material became freely available online, and mainstream film quietly ceded the territory.

The socialist magazine Jacobin recently published a piece arguing that romantic love, at its best, can "serve as a site of resistance." In a media environment where algorithms reward extremity—body counts, bank balances, misogynist ideology packaged as self-improvement—stories about people who genuinely care for each other are doing something quietly political. They normalize the idea that other people's happiness matters.

The Asymmetry Worth Noticing

The cultural appetite for romance isn't hard to find. It's in the 51 million novels sold. It's in the ballads dominating the charts. It's in the audience response to Heated Rivalry. What's missing is the supply side: studios, streamers, and networks willing to make love stories that take the emotional stakes seriously.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy—which argued that women over 50 can find happiness and that kindness matters in a partner—was denied a US theatrical release and sent directly to Peacock. Materialists wore a rom-com frame but was too sharp in its dissection of modern cynicism to fully commit to the warmth the genre requires. The industry seems uncertain whether audiences will accept sincerity, so it hedges. The audience, meanwhile, keeps showing up for the stories that don't.

The gap between what people are reading and what they're being shown on screen is not a minor aesthetic mismatch. It reflects a broader cultural uncertainty about whether love—mutual, equal, transformative—is still a story worth telling.