If you’ve watched a new romance movie on streaming recently, you know that age gap romances are hot right now. Specifically, age gap romance movies starring an older, established Hollywood actress and a younger, hunky man. In the past six months, no less than three movies like this have been released via streaming: Anne Hathaway’s The Idea of You, Nicole Kidman’s A Family Affair, and, most recently, Laura Dern’s Lonely Planet. (And no, May December, which came out in late 2023 and deals with a similar subject on the surface, does not belong on this list. Just because it’s about a romance does not mean it is a romance.)
Inevitably, popularity breeds backlash. Just ask Chappell Roan. In the wake of Lonely’s Planet‘s release on Netflix last Friday, viewers took to X and Letterboxd to bemoan the surge of the “cougar cinematic universe.” It’s easy to dismiss a pop culture trend as the fixation of the uninformed masses—especially when the people who make up the masses are mostly women. Remember the condescending reaction to the many vampire romances that followed the Twilight craze? Just saying.
But I’m here to ask you to resist the temptation to scoff, and instead consider the fact that this era of age gap romances is good, actually. Why? Because it’s pushing back against the longtime, sexist Hollywood tradition of writing off women over 40.
Let’s start with The Idea Of You, arguably the best of the three examples. Based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Robinne Lee—and not, in fact, Harry Styles fan fiction—The Idea of You released via streaming on Amazon Prime in May, and stars Hathaway as a single mom who takes her 16-year-old daughter to see her favorite boy band. When Hathaway accidentally walks into the trailer of the 24-year-old frontman, played by 29-year-old Nicholas Galitzine, there are immediate sparks. Hathaway insists she’s too old for him, but Galitzine is persistent, and, eventually, their love story blooms.
At 41—with an Oscar, a Globe, and an Emmy to her name—Hathaway is a bonafide Hollywood A-lister. Yet before The Idea of You, it’d been at least five years since she’d had a “hit” movie: 2018’s Ocean’s 8. Sure, the pandemic is at least partially to blame for that. But it’s also the fact there simply aren’t many commercially viable roles for women over 40. Men like Liam Neeson can be action leads well into their 70s, but women are relegated to playing mothers of young protagonists—usually a supporting role, at best.
In the 2010s, Hathaway took advantage of the “female reboot” trend, and absolutely killed it as an egotistical actress who assists in a jewel heist. Now she’s leading the charge for a new trend that helps land women not just leading roles, but leading roles in movies people really want to watch. While we don’t have box office numbers for The Idea Of You, it was a huge streaming hit for Amazon Prime, with a reported 50 million viewers in the first two weeks of release.
A month later, Netflix’s followed in the footprints of The Idea of You with its own take on the trope: A Family Affair, a romantic comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a middle-age mom who falls in love with a much younger movie star (played by Zac Efron). For Kidman and Efron’s characters, the age gap isn’t really an issue—it’s more the fact that Efron happens to be the boss of Kidman’s twenty-something daughter (played by Joey King). But Kidman and Efron’s dynamic still relies on the sweet, eager-to-please innocence of Efron, who is 36, and the jaded suspicion of Kidman, who is 57.
In a previous interview with Decider, director Richard LaGravenese said that while he hadn’t known about the Hathaway film when he was filming A Family Affair, he agreed that his movie was “in sync with a cultural wave” of movies about women finding romance later in life with younger men—and proud to be a part of it.
“It’s about time,” LaGravenese told Decider. “In the old Hollywood days, there were a lot of [films] where actresses like Joan Crawford had romances with much younger men. There’s Sunset Boulevard, which is about a 50-year-old and a 30-year-old. It just feels to me like it should never be an issue to begin with. So I’m glad everybody’s going, ‘Oh, this is great, and this is sexy, and this is absolutely right.'”
That brings us to Lonely Planet, the latest entry in the trend. Written and directed by Susannah Grant (also known for penning the Erin Brockovich script), this romantic drama stars Oscar-winner Laura Dern as a successful novelist who attends a prestigious writer’s retreat in Morocco and falls into a romantic entanglement with a younger man, played by Hunger Games hunk Liam Hemsworth.
Like The Idea Of You and A Family Affair before, Lonely Planet is a fun watch that goes down easy on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Dern (who is 57) and Hemsworth (who is 34) circle each other with heated looks and sizzling chemistry—including some very sexy nuzzling—until, finally, they have passionate sex against a wall. The age gap thing is mostly unspoken, only referenced when Dern calls Hemsworth “a kid.” Yet, like with Kidman and Efron, it colors the entire dynamic, from Hemsworth’s insecurities to Dern’s hesitations.
That’s the thing about all three of these age gap romances: They’re sexy! Audiences crave adult romances, with adults doing adult things, like sex. It’s too early to call Lonely Planet a hit for Netflix, but the film is currently trending in the No. 2 slot on the streamer’s Top 10 Movies in the U.S. list, and that’s a good sign. People like romance and sex, and they like seeing actors like Hathaway, Kidman, and Dern in leading roles.
For decades, older men have been paired off with younger women on screen, and no one’s batted an eye. Harrison Ford was 15 years older than Melanie Griffith in Working Girl; Richard Gere was 19 years older than Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman; Jim Carrey was 13 years older than Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—the list goes on. (All of these examples are bigger gaps than the 11-year difference between Hathaway and Galitzine, for the record.) Now, Hollywood’s leading ladies are getting a turn, and getting some (hopefully) high-paying roles they might not otherwise get. If that’s wrong, then I don’t want to be right. Long live the cougar cinematic universe.