The other day I caught a trailer for Bride Wars, a film that stars Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson as two friends who turn against each other when their weddings are scheduled for the exact same day. And I found myself wondering what the male equivalent of such a movie would be.
In recent years, we have seen the rise of the “bromance”, the “man-crush rom-com“, the buddy movie about two straight men whose relationship follows the same narrative contours as a typical romantic comedy. In movies like Wedding Crashers, Superbad, Role Models and so on, two guys — or three, in the case of Pineapple Express — start as friends, “break up” about 15 to 30 minutes before the end, and then come together in a climactic reconciliation. These men may or may not be involved in relationships with women, but ultimately, it is the affection between the men themselves that matters most.
Watching the trailer for Bride Wars, I was reminded of the upcoming Paul Rudd comedy I Love You, Man. Unlike Bride Wars, which is about two existing female friends who come to blows over a wedding date, I Love You, Man is all about a recently engaged man who needs to find a male friend to be his best man. (As Patrick Goldstein recently summarized it, the movie is about “a loner engaged to a nice girl” who “proceeds to go out on a series of male dates, hoping to find the right guy.”) In one film, the women come apart over a wedding, while in the other film, the men come together.
And so, watching the Bride Wars trailer, I wondered what a movie about men coming apart over a wedding might look like.
Well, it looks like we might find out soon. Variety reports that Universal Pictures has acquired the script for a film called Best Man-a-Thon, which will concern “a groom who’s planning his wedding and his two buddies who battle to be best man.”
It may be noteworthy that Best Man-a-Thon will concern not rival bridegrooms — which would provide a more exact parallel to Bride Wars — but, rather, rival groomsmen. That may or may not reflect cultural assumptions about the differences between male and female attitudes towards weddings: the female movie focuses on a conflict over the “special day”, whereas the male movie has more to do with one’s status within a given social group.
In fact, Best Man-a-Thon sounds kind of like it could be the “bromance” version of all those romantic comedies in which two women compete for a man’s affections (or, alternatively, two men compete for a woman’s affections).
It will be interesting to see what aspects of that buddy triangle the movie emphasizes, and whether the film ends up looking more like the all-male version of Bridget Jones’s Diary (in which one groomsman is clearly “right” for the bridegroom while the other is not) or the all-male version of My Best Friend’s Wedding (in which one groomsman has to learn to “let go” of the bridegroom and accept his preference for the other groomsman).
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