How studios turned off-screen chemistry into a box office strategy

In April 2024, several months after Anyone But You had quietly become the most improbable box office story of the year: a film that opened to $6 million and eventually crossed $220 million worldwide, Glen Powell sat down with The New York Times and explained what had happened. "The two things that you have to sell a rom-com are fun and chemistry," he said. "Sydney and I have a ton of fun together, and we have a ton of effortless chemistry. That's people wanting what's on the screen off the screen, and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit, and it worked wonderfully. Sydney is very smart."

That quote is the clearest public acknowledgment that romance baiting is a coordinated campaign strategy rather than a happy accident of casting. It is also a useful starting point for understanding how systematically studios and talent are now using off-screen relationship dynamics (real, amplified, or manufactured) as a marketing variable.

The term is a portmanteau of "showmance" and "romance," and the concept is not new. Hollywood history is full of co-stars who leaned into press chemistry in service of ticket sales; studios planted those stories with gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons for decades. What is new in 2026 is the infrastructure. Social media has replaced the gossip column as the distribution channel, fan accounts have replaced the studio publicist as the amplification mechanism, and the cast themselves have replaced the anonymous source as the origin point. The mechanic is the same. The speed and scale are entirely different.

The basic architecture: during the press tour, co-stars are photographed together in ways that read as intimate. They give interviews in which they describe each other in charged language. Moments from set are shared that blur the line between acting chemistry and genuine feeling. Fan accounts aggregate the moments and post about them. The posts generate discourse. The discourse generates coverage. The coverage generates awareness for a film that might otherwise have been lost in a crowded release window. The hashtag #AnyoneButYou accumulated 2.8 billion views on TikTok. Not all of that is attributable to the off-screen chemistry campaign, but the awareness it generated is inseparable from it.

The Wuthering Heights press tour is the most elaborate recent example. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi spent most of the press tour gushing over one another, playing up their chemistry in every interview, with Elordi saying the two had a "mutual obsession" with each other, while Robbie is married to producer Tom Ackerley and Elordi was in a separate relationship. Robbie purchased matching signet rings by Cece Jewellery for herself and Elordi, featuring two entwined skeletons in the pose of the film's iconic poster, with Emily Brontë's words engraved around them. Director Emerald Fennell had installed shrines of each actor in the other's dressing room during filming. Australian press called it a "showmance" openly, noting that the two had "played up their offscreen bond as a signal of the heat you'll see in the film, as if to say, if this is the foreplay, wait until you see the real thing." The film opened to $37.5 million. It missed its tracking range.

The pattern across five recent films is consistent enough to be instructive but complicated enough to resist a clean thesis. Anyone But You ($220M WW) is the clearest success: a film that opened soft, sustained on word-of-mouth and social chemistry discourse, and eventually became the first rom-com to cross $200 million since Crazy Rich Asians in 2018. Sweeney served as executive producer and was deeply involved in the marketing strategy, meaning the romance baiting was not something that happened to the film but something the film was designed around. Challengers ($95M WW) used the Zendaya love triangle energy without ever confirming anything and let the film's actual plot do most of the work. The Drama ($92M WW) deployed Zendaya and Robert Pattinson chemistry in a campaign that deliberately withheld what the film was actually about, using romantic tension as a placeholder for plot information.

It Ends With Us ($351M WW) is the cautionary case. The Lively/Baldoni dynamic generated enormous press coverage, but the coverage was largely negative; a genuine conflict that spilled into public view and nearly overshadowed the film's release. The film still performed, which is its own data point, but the lesson is not that negative press chemistry works. It is that the awareness the conflict generated was large enough to survive the damage. That is a different argument than the case for deliberate romance baiting.

Wuthering Heights at $168M worldwide is the most complicated entry. It missed its $50-55M tracking range on a film with a $100M production budget and a substantial marketing spend. The Robbie/Elordi press tour generated enormous coverage and social engagement. The film still underperformed relative to its cost. Chemistry awareness and theatrical conversion are different things, and for a period epic with a non-traditional runtime and an adult female-skewing demographic, the gap between the two was larger than the campaign accounted for.

The Anyone But You model (cast deeply invested in the marketing, organic chemistry that audiences can read as genuine, a campaign built around that chemistry from pre-production through release) works when the underlying conditions are real. Powell and Sweeney are genuinely charismatic together. The campaign amplified something authentic. When the campaign amplifies something manufactured, audiences, who are extremely good at detecting inauthenticity on social media, tend to notice.

A recent pattern of films marketed as romances with heavier themes obscured has generated audience backlash that is worth treating as a separate signal: It Ends With Us survivors spoke out about being blindsided by the domestic violence storyline that was promoted so lightly. Materialists was critiqued for not delivering on the rom-com tropes the promotional materials played into. The Drama's bait-and-switch, in which the film was sold as a wedding romance and revealed itself as something darker, is now the subject of active critical debate about whether the marketing was misleading or a masterclass in withholding. Studios using romantic framing as cover for darker material are running a risk that the Anyone But You success story obscures: the audience that shows up for a romance and gets something else is not just an unsatisfied customer. They are a social media post about how the campaign lied to them.

The tactic works. It also has specific conditions under which it works, a specific cost when those conditions are not met, and an audience that is increasingly aware that the press tour is a performance. What it has not yet encountered is a press tour that was genuinely and visibly manufactured from the outside. When it does, the backlash will be proportional to how much goodwill the campaign spent getting there.

CAMPAIGN STRATEGY 📋 A24's Drama marketing controversy: was the wedding-focused promo misleading or a masterclass? (Variety) A24 began The Drama campaign not with a trailer but a mock engagement announcement planted in the Boston Globe beside the romance advice column, followed by a Valentine's Day RSVP website for the fictional couple, a Vogue editorial, and a poster of Zendaya in a wedding dress. Only as the release approached did the marketing reveal the film's darker nature. Variety's breakdown found the film grossed $28M opening weekend domestically on a $28M budget, a solid start; the controversy over misleading romantic framing has opened a broader industry question about the ethics and effectiveness of bait-and-switch campaigns, particularly for studios marketing difficult content to audiences who came for something else.

EXHIBITION 📊 AMC Networks x Fandango outcomes tool finds ad exposure drove 46% higher ticket purchase rates; the first infrastructure to close the loop between TV spend and box office (Variety) AMC Networks announced in March 2026 that its Outcomes attribution product now incorporates Fandango ticket purchase data alongside iSpot ad exposure tracking. A studio campaign for a horror release found that viewers exposed to ads were 25% more likely to visit the film's Fandango page, 28% more likely to research movie times, and 46% more likely to purchase tickets. For the first time, studios can close the loop between a specific TV ad buy and a confirmed ticket purchase, which is a fundamentally different accountability standard than awareness metrics. The romance baiting question becomes answerable with this infrastructure: does off-screen chemistry press coverage actually convert to tickets, or does it generate views without seats?