For millennials, it was their first taste of a hard truth: sometimes, someone chooses someone else.
In the grand canon of romantic comedies, My Best Friend’s Wedding dared to do what most wouldn’t: let the girl not get the guy. Now, 28 years later, it’s getting a sequel. Sony has tapped Past Lives director Celine Song to write the screenplay, and while no casting is confirmed yet, Dermot Mulroney recently teased “lawyers are talking.”
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The original 1997 film starred Julia Roberts as Julianne, a food critic who finds out her longtime best friend Michael (Mulroney) is marrying a 20-year-old college student named Kimmy (Cameron Diaz). Days before the wedding, Julianne realizes she’s in love with Michael and decides to try and steal him back. And, as we know, she fails.
In a decade full of rom-coms that promised soulmates and last-minute confessions, My Best Friend’s Wedding let the mess sit. Julianne’s plan doesn’t work and Michael goes through with the wedding. And in the final scene, Julianne sits alone at the reception in a lavender gown, left with nothing but her grief and Rupert Everett’s scene-stealing George to remind her that life does go on. “Maybe there won’t be marriage. Maybe there won’t be sex. But by God, there’ll be dancing.”
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The film was a box office hit and is still widely rewatched, but what made it last wasn’t just the cast or soundtrack, it was the emotional realism. For millennials, it was a first taste of a hard truth: that sometimes, love doesn’t arrive in the right order. Sometimes, someone chooses someone else. And sometimes, your job isn’t to fight for love, it’s to survive its absence (with your dignity intact).
That’s why Celine Song is such an inspired choice to take the sequel forward. Her film Past Lives also explored a different kind of heartbreak: the slow ache of what might have been. If Julianne is coming back, hopefully it won’t be to reclaim anything, but to to examine what she’s carried all these years and who she became because of it—let’s hope!
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We live in a time of unfinished business and unspoken feelings, where the people who knew us best often fade without a proper ending. This sequel has the chance to bridge those worlds. It can honor the original while speaking to a generation that sees “almosts” or “TOTGAs” not as failure but as a choice they made for their own peace.
For Gen Z, maybe now’s the time to stream the original. And for the rest of us, maybe this next chapter will offer what we didn’t know we needed: a reminder that even when you don’t get the person, the story can still matter.
