Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Melanie Fischer | Film | October 30, 2025
The best and worst moment of Regretting You, the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation, is perhaps the very first one. A nondescript car cruises down a nondescript road with The Killers’ “When You Were Young” blaring through the speakers (a radio DJ announces it’s a new single, to place the action solidly in 2006). As a Zillennial, that song has a direct line to my feelings, regardless of context.
The action only stays in 2006 long enough introduce our central characters and set up the major conflicts as economically as possible: there’s parentified eldest daughter Morgan (Allison Williams), her free-spirited younger sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), Morgan’s boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), and Chris’s introverted best friend Jonah (Dave Franco), who’s also dating Jenny. There are some lines of dialogue to set up that they’re all ready to graduate high school and move on with their lives, a few more to make it clear that Morgan/Jonah and Jenny/Chris would be the more compatible couples (“how did we both end up with our exact opposites?”), and then a bombshell: Morgan is pregnant with Chris’s baby.
Fast forward 17 years. That fetus is now Clara (Mckenna Grace), not just old enough to drive, but graduating high school. The way in which Regretting You so explicitly lays out just how long ago “When You Were Young” was released is a personal attack that aged me like the beach in Old. It’s downright rude, but an admittedly well struck blow. It’s also the last time the movie inspired a feeling besides mild annoyance or sheer boredom, and two hours still remained.
Morgan and Chris married for Clara’s sake and have stayed married, because this is the kind of story where that’s the only valid response to an unplanned pregnancy. Jonah and Jenny are also together with a new baby of their own, but the film immediately clarifies that this is a new and similarly unexpected development — they broke up after high school, Jonah left town and never returned until a funeral brought him home, and the surprise pregnancy kept him there. The movie bumbles about for nearly 30 minutes before getting to the actual inciting incident: Chris and Jenny die in a car accident, together. While suspicious under the best of circumstances, the fact that both were supposed to be at work at the time does not help, nor does the film even bother to suggest a potentially benign explanation, although it still drags out the “investigation” for an absurdly long time.
Everything about Regretting You screams “made for streaming,” from Josh Boone’s milquetoast direction to Susan McMartin’s script, which can somewhat generously be deemed serviceable (having not read the book, I cannot speak to how much of the Wattpad-tier dialogue here comes straight from the source). Allison Williams and Dave Franco are both decent enough actors to carry a movie given the right role, but these are really not the right roles for them in ways that are all the more glaring on a big screen. Everything about the movie feels small — not just because it is quite simply not good, but by the fundamental nature of what it is. It’s intentionally small, an Americana fantasy of small-town domesticity, a film that takes place primarily in kitchens and cars, where the protagonist is scolded with the line, “stop doing the dishes on your birthday and take the baby.” What else might she want to do more on her own birthday than hold someone else’s baby? (Colleen Hoover and tradwives trending simultaneously is no coincidence.)
The particularly befuddling bit is that, of the major studios, Paramount has one of the better track records in terms of identifying what makes for a theatrical vs. streaming movie, even when it means switching up the plans relatively late in the game (e.g. Smile, which was made for Paramount Plus until strong test screenings inspired a pivot). Is the Colleen Hoover of it all really that powerful? It’s the one true mystery in a film that can otherwise be predicted with total accuracy based on the trailer alone. Then about midway through comes the reveal that puts all the pieces together: the AMC Theatres product placement. AMC Theatres is on display in Regretting You to an extent that rivals Subway in a K-drama, a lineage of product placement so iconic John Oliver did a bit about it. The irony of the most blatant movie theater chain product placement existing in one of the least cinematic movies possible is pretty incredible.
But to get back to the story, Regretting You actually splits its attention evenly between Morgan and Clara, who has her own romance with “popular” “bad boy” Miller Adams (Mason Thames). Both these terms are in quotation marks because despite being repeatedly described as the “coolest guy in school,” he only seems to have one nerdy friend (who’s also his coworker at AMC), and besides having a father who apparently did some bad stuff, if he was any more clean-cut he’d be a Ken doll. Where Morgan is a particularly uninspired take on a classic women’s melodrama heroine — a living martyr putting her family before herself even at extreme personal cost — Clara is the most grating kind of Disney Channel movie lead who we are repeatedly told is a sweet and ambitious honors student but is shown as gratingly self-absorbed, even by teenage standards, with the situational intelligence of a goldfish.
To be clear, I am not a hater of romance, nor of melodrama. Regretting You has just enough of a distant echo of what soapy melodrama can be that it made me want to seek out one of the good examples of the genre, which means either going way back in time to when Hollywood still made films like these as if they actually cared about them, like Imitation of Life and Stella Dallas, or looking to TV instead (Rivals on Hulu is generally excellent and features an actually compelling teen protagonist). Romantic melodramas deserve better, but until someone actually takes the mantle, we will continue to have a steady trickle of dreck like this. Whether that’s better or worse than nothing at all is debatable.
Regretting You is now playing in theaters.
