‘You, Me & Tuscany’ Could Decide Black Rom-Coms’ Future

In the midst of trying to sell her own Black-led romantic comedy to Hollywood studios and executives, filmmaker Nina Lee kept hearing the name of another: “You, Me & Tuscany.”

The buzzy film, directed by Kat Coiro and starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page, centers on a young woman whose impulsive decision to crash an empty Italian villa sparks an unexpected romance that changes her life. It arrives in theaters April 10.

It’s the kind of fun-loving, big-screen rom-com that audiences — especially Black audiences — haven’t seen in a while. And by all accounts, a lot is riding on its release.

That became especially clear in a series of viral posts Lee shared Wednesday on X, where she strongly encouraged moviegoers to show up for “You, Me & Tuscany” next month. Her posts came in response to another noting that studios are closely watching the film’s opening weekend to gauge its box office performance.

“1. Met with a studio about my already shot romcom and they won’t buy it until they see how You, Me & Tuscany does. 2. Met with an exec about a romance script I have, they won’t buy it until they see how You, Me & Tuscany does,” Lee wrote in one X post.

“A film that has nothing to do with me could quite literally change my life,” she added in her thread.

Within 24 hours, Lee’s posts racked up hundreds of reshares and quote tweets, more than half a million views and a flurry of reactions from outraged users responding to her industry revelation.

Lee’s posts even drew a response from “You, Me & Tuscany” producer Will Packer, who echoed her point that the success of the film — a rom-com with two Black leads getting a wide theatrical release, a rarity in Hollywood’s “current IP obsessed environment” — could “change a lot of people’s lives.”

“It was nuts,” Lee told HuffPost of the stir her posts caused. “I didn’t think anything about it. I kind of just went on about my day. I was judging a short film competition at a high school, and so I get out of the program, check my phone and I’m like, ‘What the hell?’”

“But it’s also really cool,” she added of the conversation her posts ignited, “because it just seemed like something that resonated with so many other filmmakers.”

It wasn’t just filmmakers agreeing with her. Lee — an award-winning director, writer and actor who has starred in projects like “Sorry About That” and her short film “Artistic” — saw the conversation hit home for Black novelists and other creatives, too. Even one screenwriter shared that his Asian American rom-com was rejected by “every studio” he went to, despite having a producer attached who had “directed the most successful rom-com in the last decade.”

“It felt like it created an open space for a dialogue about how, as Black filmmakers, as people of color, so many things rest upon whether our works get seen or not,” Lee noted.

“You, Me & Tuscany” marks the first Black-led rom-com to reach theaters in what feels like ages — but not for a lack of effort.

As Lee explained, she’s been working to secure distribution for her own rom-com, “That’s Her,” starring comedian Kountry Wayne and Grammy-winning singer Coco Jones, since production wrapped at the end of 2024, with post-production finishing this past September.

“That was kind of the beginning of a lot of nos,” the director said of the meetings with studios and executives that began the following month.

Even so, she recalled execs telling her, “We want to meet the director because we still really loved [the movie]. We just don’t want to buy it.”

For Lee, that feedback was “interesting,” but not entirely surprising — especially as she continued hearing about other rom-coms already on studios’ slates, with decision-makers waiting to see how those perform with audiences before committing to anything new.

“But I still appreciated those execs reaching out just to give me some words of encouragement, because shit was real bleak earlier this year,” the filmmaker said bluntly, noting that, so far, she hasn’t directed anything yet, all studios have passed on her film and she also got laid off from her day job.

“That just made me remember, OK, it’s not me. I’m a good director. I have a good film,” she told herself. “It’s the industry.”

That’s a fair assessment on Lee’s part, especially given that her viral X thread included screenshots from the 2025 ReFrame Report, which analyzed the year’s top 100 films according to IMDb Pro and found that only 11 were directed by women. When I asked why she highlighted that statistic publicly, Lee simply said, “because it’s hard out here.”

“It’s not just a Black issue,” Lee added. “My white female director friends are going through it.”

She witnessed this firsthand during her time on HBO Max’s 2023 “Project Greenlight” reboot, which gave filmmakers the opportunity to direct their first feature film.

“Some of the girls were white, and they’re not getting their films made,” Lee recalled. “Really, no one is getting their films made the way they used to. … It’s hard for women in general. But then you add in the [intersectionality] of it all, I’m Black, and I’m a woman, it’s just even more bleak.”

Even with the challenges of the industry and recent setbacks, Lee’s passion for filmmaking remains steadfast. She still plans to move forward with her film — which also features Loretta Devine, Emmy Raver-Lampman, J. Alphonse Nicholson, Tabitha Brown, Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams and Bovi — and bring it to audiences soon.

“We’ve all just decided we’re going to create our own momentum for this and show people that there is a space for it,” Lee said of the rom-com. “And in that, I’m including uplifting other films.”

“It takes a lot of nos to get that yes,” she added. “But I’m used to it.”

It wasn’t always this way for Black rom-coms in Hollywood. There was a golden era in the ’90s and early 2000s when audiences could count on at least one hitting theaters nearly every year, from “Strictly Business” (1991), “Boomerang” (1992), “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (1998) and “The Best Man” (1999) to “Two Can Play That Game” (2001), “Brown Sugar” (2002), “Breakin’ All the Rules” (2004), “Last Holiday” (2006) and more.

“Romantic comedies were a staple at that time,” Gary Hardwick, director of “Deliver Us From Eva” and “The Brothers,” two more classic rom-coms, told Glamour in 2019. “Every spring, you knew there would be one or two or three around Valentine’s Day and then through the summer. For a long time, they were making hundreds of millions of dollars, so it was a thriving market.”

Even in the 2010s, rom-coms like “Think Like a Man” (2012), “Jumping the Broom” (2011), “Just Wright” (2010) and “About Last Night” (2014) revived a period of nostalgia where Black love and joy onscreen once again felt abundant.

Since then, though, it’s been a dry spell, with fewer and fewer rom-coms being produced as Hollywood has leaned heavily into the superhero craze. Perhaps the industry needs “a come-to-Jesus moment,” as “The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat” director Tina Mabry previously suggested to HuffPost, “to say, ‘What are we doing?’”

“Y’all could still make money and we can still make art,” she pointed out in an honest assessment of Hollywood. “The two don’t have to cross each other out, and everything doesn’t have to be a Marvel movie. It just doesn’t.”

As Hardwick noted to Glamour, “everyone suffers a little bit by comparison” when the industry’s interests shift away from rom-coms in favor of million-dollar moneymakers like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and IP-driven blockbusters. However, Black people “tend to suffer more because there’s less product made for us in the first place.”

“What seems like a minor ailment to the business seems like a catastrophic ailment to us,” he continued. “If they made 10 comedies years ago, now they’re only making five. They might have made two of those as Black comedies, and now there are none.”

That’s part of why there’s so much pressure riding on “You, Me & Tuscany” — not just for the film itself, but for the future of Black romance films as a whole. The stakes that the rom-com represents resonate not only with audiences supporting it online (and soon in theaters) but also with the film’s leading cast.

Speaking with People about why he signed on, Page hinted that the scarcity of recent rom-coms played a role.

“It might have been that. The idea that the rom-com is dead,” he said. “Love definitely isn’t dead. Love will save us. And I think that I’m happy to wave that flag.”

For Bailey, she told SiriusXM’s Sway Calloway and Heather B that, as a Black woman, she’s become more intentional about starring in projects “where I see myself.”

“It’s so important for us to see ourselves,” she added of the film, “especially as beautiful Black people.”

With each new Black-led rom-com that comes along, audiences are offered a glimmer of hope for a changing tide, even if the path ahead looks steep. Today, theatrical releases are up against the streaming powerhouses, and the industry itself seems to have regressed when it comes to regularly churning out romantic comedies — and even fewer starring Black leads.

“I think that the film industry is in a new space when it comes to streaming and people allegedly not going out to theaters as much, so everyone’s just trying to figure it out,” Lee noted. “Unfortunately, when things are trying to be figured out, the first thing at risk of being abandoned is Black art, and so there’s this importance of just support, support, support.”

“Love Jones” director Theodore Witcher told HuffPost in 2020 that rom-coms have historically been “difficult to pull off successfully.” Still, fans planning to see “You, Me & Tuscany” during its opening week seem determined to prove otherwise.

In a perfect world, “You, Me & Tuscany” could pull a box office upset and prove the industry wrong. But as hopeful as Lee remains, she recognizes that studios may still hesitate to pick up rom-coms like hers. This is, after all, the same industry that has hardly made it easy for women in Hollywood to break through — even after the billion-dollar success of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” just three years ago.

“We should be having more films directed by women — blockbuster films. And that just did not happen,” Lee said. “So there’s a chance [that they will move the goalpost]. That just means you gotta keep fighting.”