Co-Founders Of Magic Hour Entertainment And Rebelle Media Plus Author Duo Christina Lauren Advise Studios & Streamers To Devote Resources To “Elevated” And “Prestige” Romance Through Casting, Chemistry & More

As Divergent author Veronica Roth pointed out in her opening of the “Romance: On the Big Screen: Why It’s About Damn Time” panel Friday at San Diego Comic-Con 2026, romance accounts for 23% of all book sales. So, while it may seem like the genre is having a moment on the big and small screens, it’s really always been a mainstay, and the entertainment industry is just loading up on what women audiences have wanted for a long time.

Roth moderated the panel, which included Christina Lauren author duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, The Love Hypothesis and Love, Theoretically author Ali Hazelwood, One and Only author Maurene Goo plus Magic Hour Entertainment co-founder Max Siemers and Rebelle Media co-founders Laura Lewis and Amanda Palley.

“Romance onscreen has, and when I say onscreen, I’m talking about the theatrical screen, has dropped over 75% the last 20 years,” Rebelle Media’s Laura Lewis said. “That audience hasn’t disappeared, and because of all the things that inspired us to get into the business — those Richard Curtis, Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron movies and TV shows — we want to bring them back. So that’s what’s inspiring us to get on these books.

Lewis’ partner Palley broke the news at the end of the panel that Rebelle Media has added Sarah Adams’ When in Rome series to their slate of book adaptations in development. The panel discussion revolved around the draw of romance, both in book form and tv and film form — whether adapted from novels or based on original screenplays — with insights from both authors and executives about how to get past the generic formula of putting a romance together. Most of the panelists favored leaning into specificity and the details that lovers of the genre latch onto while consuming a book, show or rom-com film.

“It’s a really cool genre to be a part of because it is written primarily by women, not exclusively [and] primarily for, but not exclusively for women,” Billings said of romance. “It is a genre that embraces diversity. It embraces queerness, embraces so many things, and it has so much cultural and socio-economic power.”

Billings and Hobbs, who have their book In a Holidaze coming to Netflix as a film adapted by Tiffany Paulson later this year, met 17 years ago sleeping on the sidewalk at the San Diego Convention Center waiting in line for the The Twilight Saga: New Moon panel featuring the cast of the then upcoming film. Reflecting on this anniversary, Billings commented on the growth of romance publishing’s presence at the convention.

Max Siemers, co-founder of the newly-formed Magic Hour Entertainment, which is now behind an adaptation of Christina Lauren’s Love & Other Words, broached the idea that certain times of year (likely Christmas and Valentine’s Day) provide windows to release romantic comedies and dramas set specifically around those holidays but with only really that as the framework.

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“You get movies, and I’m not going to name movies, but there are movies that come out on certain platforms at certain periods of the year,” he said. “They all do really well, and because they do well, you have a lot of people thinking ‘Well, looks like we can still get viewers without having to try very hard with how we’re spending that money.’”

To that point, Billings commented on producers she’s worked with taking the time to see what fans love about a specific romance story versus going at it purely for the motivation of the baked-in book fanbase and anticipation for any level of adaptation of a title.

“When we’re talking to our producers, who are huge fans of the genre and really, really care about it as a genre. They go in and they read the comments. They see what you’re saying. They care what you guys want to see. They care who you want cast,” she said. “This is what’s really nice about this day and age of being an author. That talking about adaptations, for the first time, I feel like the people who are doing the adaptations are genuinely invested in the genre. They’re not just seeing, ‘How many eyeballs can we get?’”

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In addition to observing that failure at the box office by a romance film trickling into the big screen trend at all for love stories in the past, Billings suggested where resources in a rom com could be devoted in order to get the core of a romance right: the chemistry.

“They need to capture the chemistry. I’m so not a movie maker, right? I don’t even know what word I should use there. But, as a viewer and a writer, what drives me crazy is that we have these huge budgets for sci-fi special effects or whatever it is,” she said. “The budget for romance needs to go to getting that tension right in the scene, giving enough time to the shot to make the two leads have that moment of eye contact or touch or whatever it is. That tension where you’re just, like, ‘Urgh, smash your faces together.’”

It’s chemistry, too, that is the “hook” studios are looking for, according to Rebelle Media’s Amanda Palley and Laura Lewis, who traced the care and investment translating to success in shows like Off Campus and Heated Rivalry, two titles dominating the romance conversation currently and the hockey subgenre. Siemers also brought up Voicemails for Isabelle as an example of a film with its fingers on the pules of dating life today.

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“You can tell with Off Campus that the whole creative team cared so much about the genre. They were students of the genre. There’s so many nods to romantic in comedies in the past. You could tell they love it, and you could tell that with Heated Rivalry,” Lewis, whose Rebelle Media has an adaptation of Christina Lauren’s The Paradise Problem in the works, said. “[Romance] did become a commodity for so long, especially in theatrical film. It became more about, ‘What’s the hook? What’s the marketing angle?’ Not, ‘What’s the story?’ What’s been the hard part for us in Hollywood is we were having to fight those people who are like, ‘What’s the hook? What makes this theatrical?’ The hook is just chemistry and dialogue and people falling in love with that, and that’s really hard to sell up.”

Another key element needing more attention, Siemers emphasized, is the look of a romance film.

“There’s been — in the past five or six years — a lack of love and care to the visual aesthetic of these films. We all grew up on Nancy Meyers, and most people don’t realize, when Nancy Myers did the Parent Trap she hired the director of photography for Jurassic Park,’ Siemers said. “Little Giants was the same DP as Schindler’s List. They were hiring brilliant cinematographers and production designers, costume designers, and they really thought about color palette and how everything’s tied together.”

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Siemers, who, with Magic Hour Entertainment partner Tanner Anderson has Ali Hazelwood’s Love, Theoretically in development with Prime Video and Colleen Hoover’s Heartbones Entertainment, traced this to an example he felt was successful, the first To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018) film he worked on at Netflix, based on the book by Jenny Han.

“Our DP came in and was like, ‘We are going to shoot this like a John Peters film, or a Wes Anderson film, and the color palette is going to match the production design. It’s going to match the costumes, and this movie is going to look hyper specific,” Siemers said. “And it got to the point where, on the third To All the Boys movie, we were calling the Empire State Building to get the color palette of the Empire State Building in the background of our shots. So it’s about attention to detail and making sure these movies look as good as whatever you think a prestige movie looks like. There’s no reason [not to.]”

It’s more than just romance as a label that will attract viewers at this point.

“In the before times between Nancy Myers and the now, it would be people thinking, well, romance theaters or viewers don’t care about [details]. No one’s going to notice that. They just want to see people kissing,” Billings added. “Whereas it’s actually not true. We want to feel like we are watching an elevated version of these things that we love.”