Romcom queen confirms return as iconic actress teases first film in nearly 10 years

There’s a movement dubbed the romcomaissance - or the romcom renaissance for people who don’t love a portmanteau - which first started to gain momentum last year.

From Julia Roberts ending her years-long break (and reunion with George Clooney) in Ticket to Paradise to Jennifer Lopez’s box-office topping Marry Me, the romcom drought was over.

Then it was revealed there a sequel to the highest grossing romcom of all time on the way, and Reese Witherspoon promised to never quit making them. 

All great news, but it gets even better as one of the early queens of the genre is finally reclaiming her crown.

That’s right… Meg Ryan is back.

The enchanting leading lady of some of the best romcoms of all time, including You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally has largely been out of the spotlight for the past few years.

Her last was the drama Ithaca released in 2015 and before that, she hadn’t made a movie since 2009.

But now, not only is she making her triumphant return to the genre she helped shape, she’s doing so wearing many different hats.

The French Kiss actress not only stars in the upcoming romcom, What Happens Later, she actually directed and co-wrote the screenplay.  

What is Meg Ryan’s new film about?

The movie, What Happens Later, sounds like classic romantic comedy gold.

The official synopsis reads, “Two ex lovers, Bill (The X Files star David Duchovny) and Willa (Meg Ryan) get snowed in at a regional airport overnight.”

“Indefinitely delayed, Willa, a magical thinker, and Bill, a catastrophic one, find themselves just as attracted to and annoyed by one another as they did decades earlier. But as they unpack the riddle of their mutual past and compare their lives to the dreams they once shared, they begin to wonder if their reunion is mere coincidence, or something more enchanted.”

Speaking about the movie, Meg teased that it has elements of all of the classic romantic comedies she’s starred in before – and the ones that came before them.

“It has a relationship to movies from the ’40s, like ‘Bringing Up Baby,’ in terms of the banter and the rhythm of things and a lot of that era of filmmaking,” she said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Nora Ephron [writer of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle] used to say about romcoms that they were really a secretly incredible delivery system to comment on the times, and we do that in this movie.”

Is there a trailer for the new Meg Ryan movie?

Of course.

When the trailer was shared on X (formerly Twitter), fans wasted no time expressing their delight at the return of Meg Ryan.

One wrote, “I'm in for ALL of this! Especially, Meg Ryan being Meg Ryan!” while another funny post read, “A Meg Ryan romcom? Released to actual movie theaters? CINEMA IS BACK.”

When is What Happens Later out?

The good news is that a release date for the US is not too far away. The movie comes out in cinemas on November 3,

The bad news is there’s currently no confirmed UK release date.