As groups of women block-booking rows of seats with friends to see Wuthering Heights look likely to help propel Emerald Fennell’s adaptation to the top of the Valentine’s weekend box office, a new survey suggests men are amenable to watching romantic movies at home – although their motivations for doing so are mixed.
A poll of 2,000 film fans on behalf of the wall-to-wall romance movie Freeview channel Great Romance has found that the top three reasons given by men for watching a romance film are feeling closer to their partner (36%), wanting a quiet life (21%) and thinking it might lead to sex (20%). Twenty per cent said that such films “remind me of the magic of when we met”, while half that number said such an activity was “low effort but still feels like bonding”.
Among the less admitted reasons were “means I can fall asleep” (8%) and “means I can check my phone” (4%).
The sexuality of those polled was not indicated, but Great Romance’s programming focuses on heterosexual stories.
The findings were that female viewers diverge significantly in some key responses, with only 15% citing an unwillingness to argue as a motivating factor for watching something mushy, while just 11% believe doing so might precipitate sex.
A third more women than men (15%) said that while low effort, it still feels like bonding, and significantly more women than men cited the potential for sleeping during the movie as a lure (11% versus 8%).
The findings chime with a similar study undertaken in 2007 by Kansas university psychology professor Richard Harris, who asked 250 men and women to watch a romantic movie together then rate their enjoyment level on a seven-point scale, with seven being the top score. While the average female rating was around six, men on average rated the film – the title of which was not revealed – a 4.8. “Everyone thinks that women like romantic movies and that they drag guys along to them,” Harris told Reuters.
“What was significant was that the guys also liked the movies, and that the choice to view a romantic movie was usually made together as a couple, not just by the girl.”
As with Great Romance’s investigation, no sexuality was specified, but the assumption is that the men and women invited to watch the movie were already couples, and that the film was not a classic of queer cinema.
Harris’s study also asked participants to guess the scene their date would most like to enact, as well as that they themselves would like to have been in. Women tended to choose romantic scenes, and guess their male partners would choose sex scenes, but Harris’s findings revealed far fewer of them played into this stereotype than anticipated.
“There are a lot of men who go to these romantic movies and enjoy them,” he said. “I wouldn’t write off the male audience just because it is a romantic film. I would suggest marketing to the men in the audience.”
Romance films released since Harris’s survey that have explicitly attempted to cater for both genders include Palm Springs, She’s Out of My League, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and much of Judd Apatow’s oeuvre including Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
The star of the last film, Steve Carell, recently said he thought box office returns for his 2011 film Crazy, Stupid, Love would have been higher had producers stuck with the original title, The Wingman. Carell believed that the buddy movie elements of the film involving his and Ryan Gosling’s characters might have attracted male viewers, both in couples and on their own, but they would have found asking for tickets to a film called Crazy, Stupid, Love embarrassing at the box office.