Why What Women Want is the great­est block­buster of the 21^st century

If you’re belea­guered by the sense that in the 21^st cen­tu­ry, block­buster film­mak­ing has been tak­en over by sequels, remakes and reboots, by fran­chise entries and movies with large-scale mer­chan­dis­ing tie-ins, there are stats to back you up. Look­ing at the top 10 world­wide box office grossers from 2000 to 2014, only 22 titles – 14.7 per cent of 150 films – don’t fall into those cat­e­gories. In the pre­vi­ous 15 years, between 1985 and 1999, it was around half.

One of the gen­res that has been over­shad­owed by this shift in mar­ket share is the big-bud­get roman­tic com­e­dy. So spare a thought for the rare mil­len­ni­al rom-com that man­ages to break through to the annu­al top rank­ing, like Mam­ma Mia! in 2008, My Big Fat Greek Wed­ding in 2002, or What Women Want, which grossed almost $400m world­wide in 2000.

Pro­duced and direct­ed by Nan­cy Mey­ers, writ­ten by Josh Gold­smith, Cathy Yus­pa and Diane Drake, What Women Want suc­cess­ful­ly tapped into anoth­er great Hol­ly­wood tra­di­tion: the high-con­cept fan­ta­sy com­e­dy, whose reli­able recipes of mind-con­trol, body dis­place­ment or iden­ti­ty-swap­ping have cooked up such con­tem­po­rary hits as 1988’s Big, 1993’s Ground­hog Day and 1997’s Liar Liar, not to men­tion hits from pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions includ­ing Freaky Fri­day from 1976, Bell Book and Can­dle from 1958 and Here Comes Mr Jor­dan from 1941.

Here, the set­up involves Mel Gib­son get­ting zapped with elec­tric­i­ty, and being sud­den­ly able to hear the thoughts of women. His Nick Mar­shall is a ​‘man’s man’, cod­dled by his show­girl moth­er in to a life of nar­cis­sis­tic suc­cess and hedo­nis­tic wom­an­is­ing, not unlike the hero of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz – and Nick thinks he’s God’s gift to the ladies, until he can hear their inter­nal dia­logue. ​“Light­en up with that after­shave, bud­dy!” ​“Do you realise I have an Ivy League edu­ca­tion and run­ning your stu­pid errands has put me in therapy?”

A hot­shot exec for Chica­go adver­tis­ing agency Sloane Cur­tis, Nick is spurned when he’s passed over for a cre­ative direc­tor pro­mo­tion in favour of Helen Hunt’s Dar­cy Maguire. Nat­u­ral­ly, being a schmuck, Nick uses his new­found pow­er to try and under­mine his rival’s posi­tion, and just as inevitably, he comes round to using his gift to becom­ing a bet­ter man, repair­ing his rela­tion­ship with his daugh­ter (Ash­ley John­son), help­ing out his female co-work­ers, and under­stand­ing Darcy’s per­son­al­i­ty and in turn falling in love with her. There’s a hol­low­ness to the romance in the film – Gib­son and Hunt don’t have much in com­mon, and as their rela­tion­ship is based on a decep­tion, the actors’ chem­istry is mut­ed. Yet there’s also a warmth to the way Mey­ers shoots pris­tine inte­ri­or design and bathes her sound­track in Sina­tra stan­dards. As with her 2015 film, The Intern, it’s uplift­ing the way she moves the sto­ry less towards hero-nar­ra­tive vic­to­ry than inter­per­son­al respect and conciliation.

Apart from the lush con­vivi­al­i­ty – also a main­stay of the works of Mey­ers’ hus­band, Charles Shy­er, as in his hit Steve Mar­tin ver­sion of Father of the Bride – one of the most play­ful, audi­ence-rous­ing aspects of What Women Want is how it plays with the straight macho star image of Mel Gib­son. In addi­tion to the many fun moments where his head is wrecked at hear­ing the dis­il­lu­sion­ing truth behind what wom­ankind real­ly thinks, we get to see him cov­er up his naked­ness, talk to his wan­ing erec­tion, wax his legs, wear lip­stick, try on tights and loud­ly pro­claim he’s gay (albeit to wrig­gle out of com­mit­ment to a past lover.)

But being a hit at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um begs the ques­tion, what is What Women Want – a suc­cess of the last cen­tu­ry or of this one? Nick’s pro­fes­sion­al dilem­ma of hav­ing to com­pete with Dar­cy is based on the idea that women aged 16 to 24 are the fastest-grow­ing con­sumer group – that they’re the future. Aspects of the movie seem pre­scient – the stream of female thoughts inun­dat­ing Gibson’s char­ac­ter have their real-world equiv­a­lent in the explo­sion of fem­i­nist feeds on social media, which few pro­fes­sion­al men could ignore in their dai­ly web browsing.

And yet this film rep­re­sents the kind of old-fash­ioned heart­warmer enter­tain­ment that’s less promi­nent in an indus­try now dom­i­nat­ed by prod­ucts for teenage boys. Per­haps this is the kind of film that can be both rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what we took for grant­ed in Hollywood’s past and a bea­con for the future – when the fran­chise mod­el plays out, there’ll always be an audi­ence for a sol­id con­cept, and there’s enlight­en­ment to be had, and mon­ey to be made, in lis­ten­ing to what women want.

What do you think is the great­est block­buster of the 21^st cen­tu­ry? Have your say @LWLies