After a long period of anticipation that began with the casting and continued through the filming, when spicy behind-the-scenes images set tongues wagging, Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s Anyone But You finally has a teaser trailer. The romantic comedy, directed by Will Gluck, premieres in theaters on December 15, and if you’re looking for swoony scenes of falling in love, this teaser is not for you. Instead, it’s all about our main couple looking hot, rolling their eyes at each other, and generally not getting along.
Per Variety, Anyone But You is about “college arch-nemeses” who “reunite years after graduation for a destination wedding,” where “they pretend to be a couple for their own personal reasons. But through pretending, they actually fall in love.” In the teaser, Sweeney proposes the fake-dating scheme to Powell, who argues that “There’s no way we could convince anyone we actually like each other.” (All the people who were convinced the actors had left their partners for each other may disagree.)
The film is reportedly a modernization of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, making Powell’s character Ben our Benedick and Sweeney’s Bea our Beatrice. That play is a foundational text for the enemies-to-lovers trope, with some strong chemistry and powerhouse performances in the roles over the years—in recent history, we’ve had Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman, to name just a few.
In other words, they’re big shoes to fill, and you’d think that Powell and Sweeney were up to the challenge based on the romance rumors that flared up during filming. Fascinatingly, though, the trailer reaction has been quite the opposite, with many Twitter/X users complaining of a lack of chemistry in the clips we’ve seen so far.
In fairness to Anyone But You, this is a pretty brief teaser where the leads spend the whole time glaring at and elbowing each other, so it’s clearly not a full picture of the picture. Rom-com fans will have to wait and see whether the off-screen sizzle translates on-screen.