Lights

Methodology

Throughout the first few months of my research process, my methodology was definitely my biggest struggle. However, I eventually found a paper that used the five highest grossing movies of one year for a feminist film study and used this to justify selecting the highest-grossing films for each decade  (Wilk, 2024). However, since one article on the history of romantic comedies used When Harry Met Sally... to define the start of the neotraditional era, I started my film selection toward the end of the 1980s (Asmelash, 2021). For all intents and purposes, I classified my first decade as starting in 1988, as Coming to America was my first film (selected because it was the highest grossing romantic comedy of the 1980s according to IMDb charts) and used five films over this "decade" because it spanned a greater time period. Additionally, my last decade was extended from 2010 to the present day, and I used four films over this period. The second paper that informed my methodology the most covered how movies must have a rotten tomato score >30% to be considered culturally significant, so regardless of the total revenue grossed in the box office, I nixed any films below this threshold (Allmann and Medeiros, 2020). This criterion was used to justify the incorporation of my last film, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, because it was the romantic comedy to receive the highest rotten tomato score 2010-present, so even though it was never released to theaters, it still arguably has great cultural significance.

Relevance

Current estimates indicate that Generation Z may be becoming less hireable (Elting, 2024). Since the Tomasula study cited above has proven that films have great educational potential, if students are learning unhealthy communication styles from popular media, it could explain the decline of the genre. Additionally, since romantic comedies have the capacity to provide education to viewers, the presence of healthy communication styles, those that effectively resolve conflict, can influence adolescents. Researchers since the turn of the century have observed that people in Generation Z do not effectively know how to resolve conflict (Parfilova, n.d.). Therefore, it is critical to remedy this through film education.