Nora Ephron’s 1998 movie, You’ve Got Mail, has been named one of the best romanticcomedies of all time. In a list compiled by Vanity Fair, the film ranked at No. 2 out of 42 films that defined the rom-com genre. The only movie that beat it was Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally.
Starring Tom Hanksand Meg Ryan, You’ve Got Mail was inspired by the 1940 movie The Shop Around the Corner. It follows rival bookstore owners Joe Fox (Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Ryan), who fall in love with each other while anonymously communicating via email—after first meeting in a then-new America Online (AOL) over-30 chat room.
Vanity Fair teased that the film featured several notable “firsts”: “Though a film about romance in the age of America Online was always going to be hopelessly dated, it was the first rom-com to normalize the thrill of flirting via chat box with an anonymous stranger," the outlet shared. "It was the first rom-com to cast Dave Chappelle as a best friend; the first to use a dial-up modem as the opening credits song; and the first to playfully skewer how easy it is to catfish a potential mate.“
Like its predecessors, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail was a box office hit, raking in over $250 million globally, per The Numbers.
Ephron knew the dial-up email piece wouldn't stand the test of time
While the anonymous love story storyline remains timeless, Ephron and her stars knew the premise of You’ve Got Mail—a small business bookstore rivaling a brick-and-mortar major chain, as well as the dial-up email communication— would someday become a nostalgic look back in time.
Ryan told Vanity Fair that Ephron was “an essayist about culture.” “To her, there was something secretly smart about this idea of corporate takeovers and what's happening to small business,” the actress said. “If there were such a thing as the next You've Got Mail, we'd have to sort of say that Barnes and Noble and those sorts of chains are being swallowed up by Amazon, and now these small bookstores are coming back again to recompete.”
Hanks also noted that Ephron joked about rushing the film in the early days of email.
“When we did You've Got Mail, I said, ‘Hey, you know, Nora, this is kind of like a follow-up to Sleepless in Seattle, let's keep that in our pocket,”‘ Hanks told Access Hollywood in 2023. “And she says, ‘Yes, it is, but we'd better hurry up while email is still a going thing.’ So even she knew how fast everything turned."
"If you look at both of those movies, Sleepless in Seattle was at this time of this radio show call-in kind of phenomenon that was part of society, and that slipped by the wayside in a matter of only five years. And what's led into its place are anonymous emails," he continued.
“We always talk about this all the time, what would Nora be making about TikTok, about social media,” Hanks added of the director, who died in 2012. “If she were around, we'd do it again.”
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