The Kissing Booth was a terrible Netflix romcom that, as far as I could see, only existed to test the limits of my already obliterated patience. It was so insipid and uninspired that watching it felt like the producers had taken a cheese grater to your brain.
So, inevitably, a sequel has just been announced. And that’s weird. Not because a film I didn’t enjoy is getting a sequel – the entire Transformers franchise is proof enough that this happens all the time – but because it’s a romcom. Romcoms don’t get sequels. They just don’t.
Romcoms are almost entirely unique, in that they’re a genre that prizes the self-contained. A successful comedy will almost always spawn a sequel. So will a successful action film. A successful horror movie will spawn its own miniature branching cinematic empire that drags on for a decade until everyone dies of boredom, given half a chance. But think about all the romcoms you love. They stand and fall alone.
Pretty Woman? No sequel. When Harry Met Sally? No sequel. Sleepless In Seattle? The Proposal? Annie Hall? Amélie? Four Weddings and a Funeral? Hors de Prix? Shallow Hal? All came, conquered and never returned.
The reasons for this are simple enough. The romantic comedy is one of our most brittle genres, having to jump through endless conventions and tropes to be considered satisfactory. There are meet-cutes and obstacles and great climactic airport scenes, plus – most importantly – everyone has to live happily ever after. That’s the point that all romcoms have to hinge on. The romcom ends with the couple newly entwined and at their absolute happiest, the illusion being that they will spend the rest of the lives in the same delirious state as when the credits roll.
And this leaves the story with nowhere to go. How could you possibly make a sequel to a story that’s already told you that the characters will live happily ever after? You can’t make a film about them just blissfully going about their lives, because that would be tedious. You can’t make a film where they struggle with the grinding mundanities of a long-term relationship, because that would ruin the glow of everything that came before. You can’t split up the couple and have one of them go through all the same romcom conventions with someone else, because that would cheapen the entire genre.
A good romcom boxes you in, and the closest anyone should expect to a sequel is a near-remake starring the same leads. So, for example, Sleepless in Seattle begat You’ve Got Mail; Pretty Woman begat Runaway Bride; The Wedding Singer begat 50 First Dates.
When straight sequels do happen, they often require a sleight of hand. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again had to be a prequel to work. Bridget Jones needed to be superhumanly indecisive and unsatisfied. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 wouldn’t have worked without its catastrophically elaborate premise, and it didn’t even work with it.
So who knows what tricks The Kissing Booth 2 will have to turn to drag a sequel out of its own bottom. At least there’s a sliver of ambiguity to play with. The last film ended, after all, with one of the couple travelling hundreds of miles away to go to college. So perhaps the two leads will have to bump into each other in a new town and go through the whole exhausting romcom meet-cute rigmarole all over again, like a pair of concussed amnesiacs, until they actually decide to stick together for good. Or, more realistically, break up forever because they realise that people who never leave their childhood sweethearts are weird.
Who knows, if The Kissing Booth 2 is a success, then it might rewrite cinema history as we know it. There’s going to be an To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before 2 and a Crazy Rich Asians 2 as well so, between them, these three films might figure out a way to keep a romcom franchise spinning in perpetuity forever. It’s a brave roll of the dice for The Kissing Booth, and one I sorely hope fails. After all, the only thing worse than a bad romantic comedy is a bad romantic comedy that has designs on making another bad romantic comedy.
