Will Gluck Makes Rom-Coms, Even When There Are Rabbits

Will Gluck's films are comedies about relationships and working out who you are. The list runs from romantic comedies around the start of the 2010s to a musical, two family films with talking rabbits and a recent return to romance. His characters get tangled in social expectations, misunderstandings and each other, and the jokes come from how awkward that is. The settings change a lot. The subject barely moves.

The early romantic comedies

He made his name in romantic comedy with films that look at the genre's rules from a contemporary angle. The rules survive the experience, slightly bent.

A rumor, managed

Easy A (2010) is a high school comedy about reputation. A student uses a false rumor to get ahead socially, then has to live with what she started. The film is about adolescent pressure and what public opinion does to a sense of self, and most of its humor comes from sharp dialogue and the heroine's cynical running commentary on her school. It introduces a type he keeps coming back to: someone trying to control their own story while everyone else is busy judging it. In high school, control is mostly theoretical.

The plan with no feelings in it

The next year came Friends with Benefits (2011), which goes straight at casual relationships. Two friends try adding sex to the friendship without adding feelings. The humor comes from the gap between what they say they want and what they obviously want. Together with Easy A, it sets out his early territory: relationships that break the usual rules, played for laughs until the laughs give away something sincere. The no-feelings clause holds about as well as you would expect.

Adaptations, with family attached

He has also taken on well-known stories and brought them round to his interests, which mostly means family. The source material changes. The interest doesn't.

An orphan, updated

Annie (2014) adapts the classic musical and moves the orphan's story into the present day. The themes of hope and belonging stay, and the songs sit inside a modern comic tone. The heart of it is the unlikely family that forms between Annie and Will Stacks, an aspiring politician. Underneath the songs it is another relationship comedy. The relationship just happens to be a family.

A garden dispute, escalated

Peter Rabbit (2018) mixes live action and CGI and brings Beatrix Potter's characters into a modern setting. The mischievous rabbit and his family end up in a comic feud with a human, Thomas McGregor, and the film combines slapstick with a story about family bonds and a territorial dispute. At heart it is a neighbor feud, told from the side of the vegetables' most dedicated fans.

A sequel followed, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway (2021), which he also directed. It looks at Peter's sense of who he is and where he fits in a blended family, so the themes of belonging and acceptance carry straight over. Both films are about chosen families and the trouble of fitting in, delivered by animals who talk. The rabbits, it turns out, have the same problems as his teenagers.

Back to romance

After the family films, he went back to romantic comedy with Anyone but You (2023). Two people whose first date went badly have to pretend to be a couple at a destination wedding. The premise brings in the genre's standard parts: misunderstandings, forced proximity and feelings that arrive slowly, and later than either of them would like. Much of the comedy comes from how hard it is to keep the act up. It links straight back to Friends with Benefits, which was also about the distance between what people intend and what they end up feeling. Different decade, same distance.

The thread

Across the six films, the pattern holds. A student fights her reputation in Easy A. Two friends attempt a no-strings deal in Friends with Benefits. An orphan finds a family in Annie. In the Peter Rabbit films, characters who can't stand each other learn to share the same patch of ground. In Anyone but You, the jokes carry two people from awkward to sincere. The comedy is not only there for its own sake. It is how the films get at identity, belonging and how unpredictable relationships are. One subject, several species.

His characters are usually trying to work out their place in the world and who they are connected to, and the humor makes that easier to watch without shrinking what is at stake. The approach travels well, from high schoolers to rabbits. For more on directors and the patterns in what they make, keep an eye on Binge Boss.