A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that the theatrical romantic comedy was dead. Streaming had swallowed it, the multiplex had moved on to superheroes, and the idea of two attractive people bickering their way toward love on the big screen felt like a relic.
Then a movie called Anyone But You came along, got savaged by critics, opened to a shrug, and proceeded to make more than $200 million anyway, single-handedly convincing Hollywood that people will still pay to watch beautiful people fall in love. Now Sony has finally given it a proper 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, released July 21, 2026, more than two years after the fact, and I’m here to tell you whether the disc is worth your money.
Let me be honest with you up front, the way I always try to be, because this is a movie people have strong feelings about in both directions. Anyone But You is not a great romantic comedy. It’s a deeply flawed one, actually, propped up almost entirely by the sheer star power of its two leads. But it’s also a lot more fun than its critics would have you believe, it looks gorgeous on 4K, and it represents a genuinely interesting moment in recent movie history. So let me walk you through the film, the phenomenon around it, and whether this new disc earns a spot on your shelf.
Table of Contents
The movie that brought the rom-com back
To understand Anyone But You, you have to understand the hole it climbed out of, because its box-office story is honestly more remarkable than the movie itself.
By late 2023, the big-screen romantic comedy had been on life support for years. The genre that once reliably minted hits had migrated almost entirely to streaming services, where rom-coms went to be half-watched on a laptop and forgotten. So when Anyone But You opened in December 2023 to lukewarm reviews and mediocre opening numbers, everyone assumed it would quietly disappear.
It didn’t. Instead, it did something almost no movie does anymore: it had legs. Powered by relentless word of mouth, a savvy viral marketing campaign, and the undeniable appeal of its two stars, it just kept selling tickets, week after week, long after it should have faded. By the end of its run it had grossed north of $200 million worldwide against a modest budget of around $25 million, making it one of the most profitable and successful romantic comedies in years.
That success mattered beyond the film itself. Anyone But You is widely credited with reviving the theatrical rom-com, proving to a skeptical industry that audiences were hungry for exactly this kind of movie and would leave the house to see it. Whatever you think of the film on its own merits, and we’ll get to that, its cultural footprint is real. It’s the little rom-com that reminded Hollywood the genre wasn’t dead after all.
The ripples spread outward, too. In the wake of Anyone But You’s success, studios grew visibly more willing to bet on mid-budget romantic comedies again, and the two leads saw their stars rise accordingly, with Glen Powell in particular vaulting to genuine leading-man status on the strength of the goodwill.
A single sleeper hit doesn’t rebuild an entire genre overnight, but this one shifted the conversation, and it did so the old-fashioned way, by getting people off their couches and into theaters to see two charming people flirt. In an era when that was supposed to be impossible, that’s no small thing, and it’s a big part of why this particular movie is worth taking seriously even when the movie itself refuses to be.
What it’s about
The premise is pure romantic-comedy machinery, and it’s built on a foundation older than Hollywood itself.
Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and Ben (Glen Powell) meet cute, have one magical almost-night together, and then, thanks to a misunderstanding, curdle into bitter enemies. Some time later, they’re thrown back together when they discover that Bea’s sister is marrying Ben’s best friend’s sister, at a lavish destination wedding in Sydney, Australia. Trapped together in paradise and tired of everyone meddling in their business, the two arch-nemeses strike a bargain: they’ll pretend to be a happy couple for the duration of the wedding, each for their own scheming reasons. And because this is a romantic comedy, you can guess exactly what happens next. In the course of faking it, they start feeling it.
It’s the fake-dating trope crossed with the enemies-to-lovers trope, two of the most beloved engines in the entire romance playbook, transplanted to a gorgeous Australian backdrop and stuffed with a wedding full of comic complications. There are no real surprises in the destination the film is heading toward. The only question, as with any rom-com, is whether the journey is charming enough to make you enjoy the trip you already know the ending of.
The Shakespeare of it all
Here’s a detail that gives Anyone But You a bit more pedigree than you might expect: it’s a loose modernization of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
If you’re not a Shakespeare buff, here’s why that’s fun to know. Much Ado About Nothing centers on Beatrice and Benedick, two sharp-tongued, commitment-averse characters locked in what the play calls a “merry war” of insults and wit, each convinced they can’t stand the other, while everyone around them can plainly see they’re meant to be together. Sound familiar? Bea and Ben aren’t just similar names by accident. The whole film is a riff on that four-hundred-year-old dynamic, right down to the meddling friends who conspire to trick the two leads into admitting their feelings. The movie even opens with a Shakespeare quotation and sprinkles in nods to its source for those paying attention.
This is very much in the wheelhouse of director Will Gluck, who has a real fondness for dressing up classic material in modern clothes. His breakout hit Easy A cleverly reworked Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter into a high-school comedy, and here he does the same trick with Shakespeare. Gluck wears the literary pedigree lightly, and you absolutely don’t need to know the play to enjoy the movie. But it’s a nice reminder that the enemies-to-lovers formula audiences still adore is one humanity has been enjoying, in one form or another, for centuries. Some things never go out of style.
The chemistry heard round the world
Now for the real reason Anyone But You became a phenomenon, and it has less to do with what’s on screen than with what happened around it.
The film stars two performers on the rise. Sydney Sweeney had broken through with acclaimed television work and was fast becoming one of the most talked-about young actresses in Hollywood. Glen Powell, a charming, square-jawed throwback of a movie star, had stolen scenes in a certain blockbuster fighter-pilot sequel and was on the verge of full-fledged leading-man status. Put them together, and the screen genuinely crackles. Their comic timing clicks, their banter has real snap, and they look, frankly, like two people carved out of Californian marble. The chemistry is the movie’s greatest special effect.
And then there’s the part that turned a modest rom-com into a viral sensation. During and after filming, the internet became absolutely convinced that Sweeney and Powell were, or should be, a real-life couple. Paparazzi photos from the Sydney set set off a frenzy of speculation, and rather than shut it down, the two stars leaned into the ambiguity, playing coy in interviews and letting the “are they or aren’t they” question simmer right through the film’s release.
It was, depending on your cynicism, either a delightful bit of old-school movie-star showmanship or a masterclass in viral marketing, and it worked spectacularly. The off-screen romance rumors sold at least as many tickets as the on-screen one. It was the kind of star-driven publicity storm Hollywood hadn’t manufactured in ages, and it’s a big part of why this particular rom-com broke through when so many others didn’t.
The two leads may be the whole show, but they’re surrounded by a game and likable supporting cast that keeps the wedding humming. Alexandra Shipp and GaTa bring warmth and comic energy as the couple whose nuptials set the whole thing in motion, and Hadley Robinson and Darren Barnet round out the younger ensemble.
Best of all, the film loads its parent roles with real Australian screen royalty: the great Bryan Brown and Rachel Griffiths turn up as wedding-adjacent elders, along with the reliably wry Dermot Mulroney, and they lend the proceedings a lived-in charm the leads can bounce off of. You can browse the full cast and crew on IMDb, and it’s a deeper bench than a movie this breezy strictly needs.
The honest part: the movie has real problems
I promised you honesty, so here it is. For all its charm and all its success, Anyone But You is a genuinely uneven film, and I understand completely why critics were unimpressed.
The core issue is tonal. When the movie lets Sweeney and Powell simply spar, trading whip-smart insults with the easy rhythm of two people who secretly adore each other, it sings. That’s the good stuff, the Beatrice-and-Benedick banter, and there’s enough of it to carry you along. But the film keeps undercutting its own charm by lurching into forced, broad, raunchy gross-out comedy, the kind of groan-worthy bawdy set pieces that feel bolted on from a lesser movie.
Too often, just as a scene finds its romantic footing, it trips over a crude gag that lands with a thud. The result is a film constantly at war with itself, torn between the sophisticated screwball comedy it could have been and the crass crowd-pleaser it sometimes settles for. The plot, meanwhile, is pure formula, a series of contrived misunderstandings marching predictably toward the inevitable.
What saves it, over and over, is the cast. Sweeney and Powell are so magnetic, so easy to root for, that they paper over the script’s weaknesses through sheer force of charisma. It’s a movie that lives or dies on its stars, and its stars keep it alive. If you go in expecting a classic on the level of the genre’s best, you’ll be disappointed. If you go in wanting a good-looking, breezy, star-powered good time, you’ll likely have fun despite the movie’s stumbles.
It’s a crowd-pleaser, not a masterpiece, and there’s honestly nothing wrong with that. For a very different but equally star-dependent recent romantic comedy, my review of The Donor Party digs into why there’s always an audience for light comedies about adults doing goofy things with each other.
The Unwritten of it all
I can’t review this movie without talking about the song, because it became one of the film’s defining cultural contributions.Director Will Gluck has a well-known habit of building set pieces around a Natasha Bedingfield song. He did it memorably in Easy A with “Pocketful of Sunshine,” and here he reaches for Bedingfield’s 2004 hit “Unwritten,” weaving it through the film and building to a big, joyous singalong payoff.
The effect was extraordinary. Anyone But You sparked a full-blown resurgence of a nearly twenty-year-old pop song, sending “Unwritten” roaring back onto the charts and into a whole new generation’s playlists, its hopeful lyrics suddenly everywhere again. It’s genuinely rare for a movie to resurrect a catalog song this completely, and it speaks to the film’s outsized pop-cultural reach. Long after you’ve forgotten the plot’s finer points, you’ll remember the song, and you’ll probably be humming it.
It helps that the whole package is easy on the eyes and ears. The Sydney setting gives the film a gorgeous travelogue quality, all sparkling harbor water, dramatic coastline, and sun-drenched beaches, functioning as a feature-length advertisement for Australian tourism. And the soundtrack, anchored by a score from Este Haim of the band HAIM alongside Chris Stracey, keeps the whole thing bouncing along with breezy energy. Whatever its script problems, Anyone But You is never less than pleasant to look at and listen to, which brings us, at last, to the disc.
The disc: how it looks
Here’s where the 4K upgrade justifies itself, because this is a very good-looking presentation of a very good-looking movie.
Sony’s 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray presents Anyone But You in its original 2.39:1 aspect ratio with a native 4K HEVC encode and, crucially, a Dolby Vision high dynamic range grade (with HDR10 as well). And Dolby Vision is exactly what a movie like this wants.
Anyone But You is built on gorgeous surfaces: the crystalline blues of Sydney Harbor, the golden glow of sun-kissed skin, the vivid greens of the Australian coastline, the pop of a wedding’s worth of colorful outfits. The wider color range and improved contrast make all of it leap off the screen. Black levels are strong and stable, the flesh tones are warm and glamorous (perhaps even a touch on the saturated side, but that suits the film’s glossy aesthetic), and there’s no digital artifacting to speak of.
Now for the honest caveats, because the upgrade isn’t limitless. Sony’s 2024 Blu-ray already looked excellent, so the fine-detail gains here are real but modest, an incremental sharpening of textures like fabric, hair, and the Sydney landscape rather than a night-and-day transformation. And there’s one quirk worth flagging: the image looks a little soft and filtered in places, a quality that appears to be baked into the original master rather than a fault of the disc, since the Blu-ray shows it too. It keeps this from being a pure reference-quality showcase.
But make no mistake, this is a beautiful disc, and the Dolby Vision grade is a genuine step up. It’s the kind of A/V presentation that reminds you why 4K remains worthwhile for the right title, much as I found with a very different recent 4K release, the crime drama The Alto Knights.
The disc: how it sounds
The headline audio upgrade here is a brand new Dolby Atmos soundtrack (with a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 core), and it’s exclusive to the 4K disc. Sony’s earlier Blu-ray carried only a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, which is also included here for good measure, so the immersive object-based Atmos mix is one of the genuine reasons to opt for this 4K release.
That said, let’s set expectations honestly. A romantic comedy is never going to give your surround system the workout that an action blockbuster does, so the Atmos mix, while a nice addition, only nominally moves the needle. There are no explosions to rattle your subwoofer, no dogfights to send sound whipping around the room.
What the Atmos track does deliver is a pleasant sense of atmosphere and space: the ambient bustle of a crowded wedding reception, the gentle wash of ocean and outdoor environments, and, most importantly, a full and enveloping presentation of the music, from Este Haim’s score to that all-important “Unwritten” singalong. Dialogue, the real priority in a movie this talky, is crisp, clear, and perfectly balanced throughout.
It’s a lovely, appropriate mix for the material, even if it’s never going to be anyone’s demo disc. A generous set of subtitle options is included, covering English, English SDH, Spanish, and French. If you want to hear what a splashier catalog title can do with Atmos, my review of the Babylon 4K disc covers a far more aggressive mix.
What’s in the case, and the double-dip question
Before we get into the extras, it’s worth pausing on why this disc exists at all, because it reflects a genuine trend worth knowing about. As the physical-media market keeps fighting for stability in a streaming-dominated world, Sony has been quietly working through its catalog, upgrading titles that originally landed on Blu-ray only to proper 4K Ultra HD editions. Anyone But You is a poster child for that strategy: a recent, popular, disc-friendly hit that sold well enough on Blu-ray to justify a fancier reissue two years on.
For collectors, this is mostly good news, since it means beloved recent films get a shot at the format’s best possible presentation. But it also creates exactly the double-dip dilemma we’re about to untangle, asking devoted fans to buy the same movie twice. It’s the state of physical media in a nutshell: a smaller, more passionate market being served real quality, at the price of a little repetition.
| Anyone But You (Sony Pictures 4K Ultra HD) | |
|---|---|
| Video | 2.39:1, native 4K HEVC, Dolby Vision / HDR10 |
| Audio | English Dolby Atmos (Dolby TrueHD 7.1 core); DTS-HD MA 5.1 |
| Subtitles | English, English SDH, Spanish, French |
| Discs | 4K UHD Blu-ray + Blu-ray + Digital copy |
| Runtime | 103 minutes |
| Rating | R |
| MSRP | $34.99 |
| Release Date | July 21, 2026 |
The bonus features are a modest affair, blending some newly produced material with the archival extras carried over from the 2024 Blu-ray. You get the usual rom-com supplements: a gag reel, a selection of deleted and extended scenes, and a handful of short, promotional featurettes about the making of the film, the cast, and the Australian locations. It’s a perfectly pleasant, if lightweight, package.
I do have one honest gripe, and it’s one shared by pretty much everyone who has covered this release. For a movie whose entire appeal rests on the chemistry of its two stars and its director’s playful sensibility, the glaring omission is a proper audio commentary with Will Gluck, Sydney Sweeney, and Glen Powell. A track with those three riffing on the shoot, the viral marketing, and their own on-set dynamic would have been an absolute delight and a genuine selling point. Its absence is a real missed opportunity, and the extras that are here don’t quite fill the gap.
Which brings us to the question every owner of the 2024 Blu-ray is asking: should you double-dip? Here’s my honest take. If you already own the Blu-ray, the upgrade is real but incremental. You’re paying for a Dolby Vision grade and an Atmos mix on top of a disc that already looked and sounded great.
For videophiles with a full Dolby Vision and Atmos setup who love the movie, that’s worth it. For everyone else who already has the Blu-ray, it’s a marginal, fans-only proposition. But if you skipped the Blu-ray, or never owned the film on disc at all, then the calculation flips entirely: this 4K Ultra HD release is now unquestionably the definitive version, and it’s the one to buy.
Should you buy it?
Let me split it a few ways, because the answer really depends on who you are.
If you love Anyone But You and you have a 4K setup with Dolby Vision and Atmos, this is an easy recommendation. It’s the best the movie has ever looked or sounded, the definitive home-video presentation, and the technical upgrades genuinely enhance a film that trades so heavily on gorgeous visuals and a great soundtrack. Buy with confidence.
If you skipped the Blu-ray and have been waiting to own the film, this is your moment. Don’t bother hunting down the older disc; the 4K is the one to get, full stop.
If you already own the 2024 Blu-ray and you’re a casual fan, you can probably skip this one. The upgrade is nice but not transformative, and your existing disc is already very good. This double-dip is for the devoted and the detail-obsessed.
And if you’ve never seen the movie and aren’t sure it’s for you? Give it a rental or a streaming spin first. Anyone But You is a divisive film, beloved by many and dismissed by others, and it’s worth confirming you’re in the “charmed” camp before committing to a 4K blind buy. But if you’re already a fan, this handsome new disc is a lovely way to bring the Sydney sunshine home.
Where to get Anyone But You on 4K UHD
Anyone But You is available now on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray from Sony Pictures, released July 21, 2026, at Amazon, Best Buy, and other major retailers, typically bundled with a standard Blu-ray and a digital copy.
Two gorgeous stars, one destination wedding, a four-hundred-year-old Shakespeare plot, and a 2004 pop song that refused to stay in the past. Anyone But You is flawed, formulaic, and frequently very silly, and it was also one of the most purely enjoyable crowd-pleasers of its year, the little rom-com that reminded everyone why we fell in love with the genre in the first place. It won’t convert the skeptics, and it doesn’t try to. It just wants to show you a good time in the sunshine with two impossibly charming people, and on that modest promise it delivers. On 4K, it’s never looked or sounded better. Pack your bags for Sydney.
You can also buy Anyone But You on 4K UHD at MovieZyng!
