‘The Idea of You’ Is a Massive Streaming Success, but Theaters Helped Get It There

Oscar-winning producer Cathy Schulman knows her way around a theatrical release. From “Crash” to “The Woman King,” the long-time Hollywood heavy-hitter has wide-ranging taste that’s earned her both a Best Picture win and millions of box office bucks. But as the theatrical landscape shifts — heck, as the entire entertainment industry shifts — Schulman is staying nimble. These days, that means something that would have sounded crazy a decade ago: a massive hit that goes straight to streaming.

That’s the case with Schulman’s latest, the Michael Showalter-directed Amazon MGM Studios smash “The Idea of You,” a sexy rom-com-dram based on Robinne Lee’s bestselling novel and starring Anne Hathaway and rising star Nicholas Galitzine. In just two weeks on Prime Video, the film has smashed up all sorts of streaming records, handily proving that people do want to watch at home, they will turn out for a streaming-only release, and the rom-com is not dead (again). And, funnily enough, that there is still plenty of value in bringing people together to watch a delightful new slice of movie confection.

Ahead, Schulman tells IndieWire about crafting a formula for a bonafide success in a brave new world, from streaming numbers to genre subversions, not being afraid to add some “dram” to the end of “rom-com,” why she isn’t scared of TikTok, and how to eventize a film most people can only see at home.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

IndieWire: Earlier this week at the Upfronts, Amazon MGM studios head Mike Hopkins said the film is expected to have 50 million worldwide viewers in its first two weeks in release, making it their biggest rom-com ever. When you hear that number, what’s your immediate response?

Cathy Schulman: It’s such a weird thing, those huge numbers are hard to get your arms around. I started to do this weird calculation, and I was thinking, “Well, what if that was box office? What if that many people bought a ticket at $20 a ticket?” Then I came up with that number: one billion [dollars], and I almost fell off my chair. Now we all know that maybe that’s not a fair equation right there, but I thought, that is a heck of a lot of people. I was able to rationalize and understand the number better that way.

At what point in the journey to get this made did you allow yourself to think, OK, we might have a hit on our hands?

Anybody could Monday morning quarterback and pretend that you know when you’re about to have a hit. As a producer, I’m always looking for things that I believe will engage audiences and trigger certain reactions, and that’s exactly the same lens with which I try to identify materials. I read the book and had this feeling that comes across me when I think I’m onto something that should be mass appeal content. I try to identify, what are the feelings? and, do I think that they’re universal? 

I loved the idea that this was a woman who had successes in managing to become an adult, have a child, have a marriage, have a career, and was willing to settle with that, it’s enough. I thought, well, I feel that way. I’m willing to settle. Then the book actually suggested, well, maybe not, maybe there’s bigger happiness out there. 

I think that at a time, coming out of COVID and the way the world’s been feeling, and certainly in our industry with our strikes and everything that was going on, reminding myself that there could be something bigger than self-actualizing in a yurt and actually seeking greater happiness was worthwhile. I thought, if I’m feeling that way, it’s going to be a unanimous kind of a feeling. 

What I didn’t anticipate is that the world would keep getting worse while we were doing this, and that the need for this sort of curative, happy, healing, romantic thing would grow and grow and grow as the darkness also grew. I think that the reason for the embracing of movies about happiness and joy and love is connected obviously to — well, maybe it’s not obvious — I think it’s connected to a craving for this feeling of possibility and joy.

The film is a huge hit on streaming, but a creative rollout centered on theatrical screenings helped. You had a big festival premiere at SXSW. You did a bunch of in-theater word-of-mouth screenings. What was the thinking there?

We felt so adamant that it was necessary that people experienced it in a group setting. In a certain way, it’s that old-fashioned, grassroots notion that things that are worthy of conversation can spread through word of mouth. Obviously, word of mouth now is a social network online, but it’s still that same thing that you have a feeling and you want to talk about it. We were onto the fact early on that the movie had this contagious notion to it. 

To Amazon’s credit, we had two very experienced executives in Courtenay Valenti and Sue Kroll, who had moved over from Warner Bros. to Amazon. They are very used to working to engage audiences, and they promised us that they would eventize this. Frankly, we were all rather skeptical because of [the thinking around streaming], which is, “Aren’t you just going to throw it on the service and people are going to have to find it in a postage stamp size square and pick it?” They said, “No, it’s possible to eventize a release for streaming,” and I think they really did that. 

I saw the film at Park Avenue Screening Room, which you know is not very big, but it was almost totally filled with people who all really responded.

There’s an interesting storytelling mechanism in there that I really must credit Michael Showalter with, because it was something he cracked when he started to work on the script. He really wanted to have this epic first act where the characters get to know each other in a pace that’s slower than [the usual pace]. In movies, we normally move as fast as we can through exposition to get to it already, and he allowed the exposition of their meeting each other to breathe in a very natural rhythm. The reason I mention this is that, when they finally kiss at the piano, every audience I’ve ever seen the movie with screams.

I remember thinking at the beginning, “Oh, my God, it’s just a kiss. How desperate are we?” But it’s not just that it’s a kiss, it’s the fact that you’re actually experiencing the slow rhythm of getting to that first moment in a relationship where you can say, “Is this more than just an acquaintance?” We go with them on this long journey and then suddenly, boom, they kiss and the whole audience screams. It was a great lesson. 

What would I try to repeat? I think that when dealing with romance, we have to keep adjusting the format. This is categorized as a romantic comedy, but it’s really quite new in a number of different ways. One of them is really, I think it’s a rom-com dram, but I think some of the other things that make it different are it’s not about a girl choosing between two guys — it’s about a girl choosing a version of happiness. It’s got a very different functional structure because she’s not choosing between two men. 

It’s also basically without bloopers. This is new. A lot of the romantic comedy format is, oh, it’s near-misses. “If only we had seen each other at the train. If only I had known that’s what you really thought.” We didn’t really do a lot of that more, I would say, constructed genre bloopers. It’s a little bit more of a naturalistic approach, more authentic, and I think that letting the relationship breathe did that. I think romantic comedy may have gotten a bad name from getting into too much patterning, but there’s nothing better than it if we can just push the genre forward so that it feels more natural and more organic for contemporary audiences.

You can see that working in terms of audience response. At SXSW, some of its biggest fans were men, which is not something we typically expect for this kind of genre film. 

It was probably from de-objectifying the guys. Instead of there being the good guy to fall in love with and the bad guy to fall in love with […] we really didn’t work with any of that. We really were cracking open the nature of overcoming multiple obstacles in a two-way street to fall in love. I did feel this was also relevant in the book, was the idea that the age difference — which is the hook — doesn’t turn out to be the biggest obstacle. It’s really the court of public opinion, living in different places, living different lifestyles, one person being famous, another person having children or a child. Those obstacles get piled in, and so there was a naturalism to the multiple obstacles that prevent us from figuring out who to be in love with.

Do you think this would have been a theatrical hit?

Well, I guess we can’t answer it. I don’t know the answer. I’m personally so inclined to love theatrical, so I can only answer the question by saying that obviously we saw the Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell movie “Anyone but You” do extremely well. If [“The Idea of You”] was triggering some of those [same] things, perhaps it would’ve been a theatrical hit. 

These numbers though that we’re talking about in terms of streaming are way beyond anything that, I think, could be achieved theatrically. By the way, when we’re talking about 50 million views, that’s presuming only one person was viewing in each situation, that probably wasn’t the case. We may be thinking of two to three to four to five times that. 

There’s no question that the worldwide ability to embrace something quick and fast and hard on streaming is a force to be reckoned with when it works, but we’ve also seen it not work very many times. I think we’re all on a learning curve. I just pray for a time when we can choose to watch movies however we want to, and if that means that we’re headed towards a world where everything is day and date released streaming and theatrically, and one can choose the forum and the format and the service with which they want to watch it. 

I like the idea that if you want to have the experience you had, which was to watch it in a screening room with people yelling and screaming together over a kiss and oohing and awing, that shouldn’t be something that we lose.

Looking at the success of both your film and “Anyone but You,” what else will it take for studios to re-embrace the romantic comedy? Or have we moved on and realized there’s a different way to deliver these films? 

There’s two different questions in there: One is, can we preserve the romantic comedy? The second is, where does it get released? In terms of preserving the romantic comedy, all arrows are pointing up. I think everybody’s seeing that these movies, whether it’s in the format of a “Red, White & Royal Blue” or in the format of something slightly more traditional like what we did, I think everybody sees that we need to come back to this particular genre and re-embrace it. That seems to be clear. 

One of the things I love about that is that it doesn’t require this franchise mentality. It can be done as one-offs or two-offs or continuing stories, but it doesn’t need to be driven by that giant machine, and it’s not as expensive either. This is a really good, healthy place for the industry to work, and if audiences are still here for it. We just have to be smart enough about it, like I said earlier, and not become entrenched in outdated genre formats, but still explore similar kinds of issues and just be fresh in how we do it. 

As to whether or not they can go back into theaters, I guess that Amazon’s point of view seemed to be that it wasn’t necessary to go into theaters because they work without it. But to me, that’s a corporate point of view versus an audience or a consumer point of view. I think that the real question is, will consumers choose to consume this content in a theater, and how do we find out? 

I would love to see the companies continue to test the market to see if they would. When I think back to the movies that formed my whole opinion about the genre, whether it was “The Proposal” or “When Harry Met Sally” or “You’ve Got Mail,” I just can’t believe that people wouldn’t go see that in a theater. But I’m older than a lot of the movie-going audience at this point, so it’s a little hard for me to make an assessment […] I think the answer is you should be able to choose.

So many of the younger movie-goers and potential movie-goers have new ways to find and watch their entertainment, TikTok and the like. How do you, as primarily a film producer, feel about the possibility that movies aren’t our primary entertainment anymore? 

The common thinking is that we’re competing for time, that whereas we may have had to compete with other movies or television shows in the past, now we’re obviously competing with a whole world of entertainment that’s coming through socials. That’s true. There’s only a limited amount of time and people are going to choose what to do, but more importantly is to watch how it can mobilize towards a collective piece of entertainment. 

Over 50 percent of our social activity in and around this particular movie is on TikTok, and that’s crazy. I’m hoping that if you keep the quality high of long-form entertainment, that short-form distractions will push interest towards long-form engagement.

“The Idea of You” is now streaming on Prime Video.