It’s been one whole day since Sony Pictures rolled out a new trailer for Anyone But You, its new Glen Powell/Sydney Sweeney rom-com, a promo vid that saw Powell and Sweeney doing a little “Oooh, they have chemistry in real life, too!” banter with some pre-roll bickering. Which leads us to a genuine question: How the hell did Nathan Fielder, Emma Stone, and Showtime’s The Curse get together so goddamn fast to drag their asses in response?
Because it was pretty much exactly 24 hours later that The Curse released the above trailer, in which Fielder and Stone flop-sweat their way through the exact same “bickering” as Powell and Sweeney, complete with the same awkward body language in front of the same robin’s egg blue background. (They’re even wearing basically the same “Bland Hollywood people being casual!” clothes.) It’s such a random swing that it picks up thathint of personal amusement that informs so much of Fielder’s work—because why else would Stone and Fielder have apparently raced to get together to mock this particular bit of stilted Hollywood promotion? You can easily imagine someone calling someone with a quick “Have you seen this? We’ve got to.”
Of course, the actual trailer that follows the parody bit is a hell of a lot darker than its source material, showcasing The Curse’s complicated, deliberately squirm-inducing examinations of gentrification, white guilt, and the kind of people who deliberately state “We’re good people!” because they’re making a “better” kind of reality TV show. In some ways, it’s a better fit for the Sweeney/Powell bit than Anyone But You, since The Curse takes the “Who’s in control of this story?” tensions in that back-and-forth far more seriously than Powell and Sweeney’s movie is likely to.
The Curse is running right now on Showtime; Anyone But You lands in theaters on December 22.
Update, 11/17/23 at 4:11 p.m.: Fielder has now responded to allegations of copying the Anyone But You trailer on Instagram, claiming that his and Stone’s The Curse trailer was filmed “over six months ago,” and accusing Sony Pictures of copying them. Referencing the fight against AI, and noting that “I personally will not be pursuing legal action,” it ends with a statement that “I know that both Emma and myself will personally be booking front row seats to Anyone But You on opening night”—and a reminder to the rest of us of how nice it can be to have a really top-notch troll working so prominently in media at the moment.