He’s Just Not That Into You arrived on February 6, 2009, with a tagline that asked the audience a blunt question: “Are you the exception… or are you the rule?”
Trailer, via HBO Max.
Nine People, One Baltimore Shoot
Ken Kwapis directed the film from a script by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, working off Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s 2004 self-help book. New Line Cinema and Flower Films produced it, with Barrymore serving as executive producer through her own company. Production began in Baltimore in 2007. The finished film runs 129 minutes and carries three genres at once: comedy, romance, drama.
The nine central romantic characters are:
- Ben Affleck as Neil
- Jennifer Aniston as Beth
- Drew Barrymore as Mary Harris
- Jennifer Connelly as Janine
- Kevin Connolly as Conor
- Bradley Cooper as Ben
- Ginnifer Goodwin as Gigi
- Scarlett Johansson as Anna
- Justin Long as Alex
Supporting players include Kris Kristofferson as Ken, Wilson Cruz as Nathan and Hedy Burress as Laura. Gigi, played by Goodwin, gets followed more closely than the other eight and carries the more developed storyline, because she consistently misreads every partner’s behavior. She meets Alex, played by Long, who takes on the job of interpreting the signs her dates keep handing her.
The Book Was the Better Format
Here is the trouble with building a movie on a self-help book: the book’s whole appeal is the short, hard answer. He’s just not that into you. One line, no hedging. A 129-minute film cannot deliver that line and then keep going without softening it, and this one softens it for nine characters at once.
The Gigi and Alex thread is the only part of the structure that earns its length, because it has a real mechanic — she reads signals wrong, he explains them — and that mechanic can repeat without going stale. Around it, the film spreads thin. Nine stories at 129 minutes leaves roughly fourteen minutes each, and ensemble pictures live or die on whether every strand justifies the time it takes from the others. Here, several do not.
Opening Weekend and the Long Tail
Warner Bros. Pictures released the film on February 6, 2009, to mixed reviews. It grossed $27.7 million on its opening weekend and over $178.8 million worldwide. Metacritic’s published score sits at 47 out of 100.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2004 | Behrendt and Tuccillo publish the book |
| 2007 | Production begins in Baltimore |
| February 6, 2009 | Warner Bros. releases the film |
| Opening weekend | $27.7 million grossed |
| Worldwide run | Over $178.8 million grossed |
Our read is that the score reflects a script unwilling to let any of its nine people be genuinely unlikable, the one thing the source book was willing to do. That is criticism, not a cause the source states.
What the Ensemble Actually Buys
Barrymore’s Flower Films got this made, and the cast is genuinely deep: Affleck, Aniston, Connelly, Johansson, Kristofferson. That is real star power on the poster.
Star power is not the same as a point of view. The film’s tagline promises a rule and an exception, a clean binary the book sold for years. The movie keeps the question and drops the answer, because an answer would require telling one of these nine people something they do not want to hear. Gigi’s storyline survives that instinct. Most of the others do not.
He’s Just Not That Into You is watchable, well-cast and structurally overloaded. The premise was sharper as a book. The box office says only that people bought tickets, not which version they wanted.
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