In February 2003, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days opened against Daredevil, made $23.7m in its first weekend, and earned the kind of reviews that suggested it would be entirely forgotten by Easter.
It went on to gross $177.5m worldwide. Critics gave it a 42% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave it 77%. Twenty-three years later, only one of those numbers still has anything useful to say about the film.
The audience was right. They’ve been quietly right for twenty-three years.
What it’s about
Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) writes the “How To” column for a women’s magazine called Composure and wants to write about something other than fad diets and lip gloss. Her editor (Bebe Neuwirth, sharp as a paper cut) gives her ten days to do something her column has never done: get a man to dump her. Across town, advertising executive Ben Barry (Matthew McConaughey) is trying to land a diamond account by betting his colleagues he can make any woman fall in love with him in the same window. They are set up at a bar. They both think they’re running the experiment. Neither of them is.
It’s a screwball premise dressed in noughties production design — and that’s exactly the point. The film knows the bet collapses the second they meet. Everything that follows is the slow, undignified business of two people running schemes on each other long after the schemes have stopped working.
Why it still works
The film does one specific thing better than almost any rom-com made since: it lets Hudson be properly, unattractively annoying. Andie’s “how to lose a guy” tactics in the middle act are not winsome quirks. She names his houseplant Krull the Warrior King. She crashes his boys’ poker night and ruins it. She calls him Bennyboo in front of his friends, with the volume up. The whole sequence is built on a single, brave creative decision: the film trusts you to find Hudson charming while she is being actively, deliberately awful, and Hudson trusts you back.
“Hudson is doing something most modern rom-com leads aren’t allowed to do anymore — being unlikeable on purpose, on camera, for laughs, and trusting you to stay with her.”
The poker-night scene is the one that sells the whole film. Andie shows up uninvited, McConaughey’s face does that specific kind of slow-collapse only McConaughey’s face does, and Hudson — unscripted, by the way — picks up a vegetable platter and starts handing carrots out like canapés. (Hudson reportedly improvised the platter throw on set; Petrie kept it.) The scene works because everyone in it is committed to being exactly the right amount of horrified. It’s farce executed with real timing, and it’s the kind of thing that critics in 2003 dismissed as silly because it looked easy. It isn’t. Watch any of the rom-coms that came after this one and try to find a comedy set piece that lands as cleanly.
The McConaughey performance is the second thing the critics missed. He’s playing a guy who is genuinely good at his job, genuinely fond of his family, and genuinely losing the bet — and he plays all three notes at once without ever leaning on the smirk. The card-game sequence at his family’s Staten Island house, where Andie accidentally has a real time and Ben accidentally falls in love, is the hinge of the film. McConaughey doesn’t telegraph it. He just lets it happen on his face while everyone else at the table is laughing.
And then there’s Kathryn Hahn, two years before Anchorman, doing more with eight scenes than most rom-com supporting players do with thirty. The film around her is a Kate Hudson vehicle. Hahn is playing the only person in it who has actually been in love.
What the critics missed
The 2003 reviews are a useful artefact. Roger Ebert dismissed it almost on contact — he opened his review by saying he was “just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about whether they will, or will not, fall in love.” The Rotten Tomatoes consensus reads, almost word-for-word, like the back of every other rom-com review filed that decade: charming leads, silly premise, predictable script. None of it was wrong, exactly. All of it missed what the film was actually doing.
What the critics didn’t account for — couldn’t, fairly — was that 2003 was the last year the genre was operating at full strength. The post-Knocked Up rom-com, the post-500 Days of Summer rom-com, the post-streaming-algorithm rom-com all had to defend themselves against a culture that had decided sincerity was embarrassing. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days doesn’t know any of that yet. It thinks people in their late twenties going to dinner and slowly liking each other is enough to build a film around. It is, as it happens, more than enough.
The audience score (77% on Rotten Tomatoes, an A− on CinemaScore, an IMDb that won’t dip below 6.5 no matter how often the algorithm reshuffles it) is what twenty-three years of women rewatching this on a Friday night actually looks like as data. The critics filed a verdict at the end of opening weekend. The audience has been filing theirs ever since.
How it landed
Hudson got a Golden Globe nomination. McConaughey did not, which is its own joke given that he’s doing the harder of the two performances. The film made its $50m budget back three times over, became Paramount’s biggest non-franchise hit of 2003, and quietly settled into the cultural furniture — the sort of film a generation can quote without having seen it in a decade. The yellow Carolina Herrera dress Hudson wears in the third act has its own small Wikipedia industry. Composure magazine remains the most accurate fictional women’s magazine in any rom-com made before or since.
The two leads never landed the chemistry again. They tried, in 2008’s Fool’s Gold, and the failure was a useful experiment — it confirmed that what they had in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days wasn’t a function of either of them individually but of Donald Petrie’s restraint as a director, of the script’s willingness to let Andie be genuinely awful for an hour, and of McConaughey playing it straight while Hudson played it loud. You can’t engineer that. They didn’t, the second time, and it showed.
Put it on at 8pm. Pour a glass of wine. The film does what almost no contemporary rom-com bothers to do anymore — it gives you two attractive people, room to like them, and ninety-six minutes to enjoy watching them figure out what the audience figured out at minute three.