This weekend, Regretting You, the second Colleen Hoover book-to-movie adaptation following last year’s tumultuous release of It Ends With Us, heads to theaters. Written by Susan McMartin and directed by The Fault in Our Stars’ Josh Boone, the film centers on two star-crossed couples—Morgan (Allison Williams) and Jonah (Dave Franco), as well as Morgan’s teen daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace) and her classmate Miller (Mason Thames), who works at his local AMC Theater. His job isn’t integral to the movie’s soapy romance plot—yet the theater chain’s logo is splashed across multiple scenes.
There are plenty of other sponcon moments in Regretting You: lingering shots of Starry soda, a storyline lifted from the book involving Jolly Ranchers, and repeated scenes where Williams’s character watches Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. (RHOSLC star Heather Gay recently hosted a screening for the movie in her Utah hometown.) But AMC’s integration into the movie feels far more brazen. Some of the most pivotal points in Clara and Miller’s relationship take place within the theater’s walls—most memorably, a scene where Clara halts their makeout session (again, at Miller’s place of work), to declare that she’s a virgin as Clueless plays onscreen. (The obvious virgin-who-can’t-drive joke goes unsaid in the movie.)
AMC has also announced a Regretting You sweepstakes, hosted specially themed screenings, and promoted the movie on social media. Reddit users picked up on the AMC promotion from the trailer alone—and so have multiple film critics since watching the movie. “A truly deranged amount of AMC product placement,” wrote Indie Wire, with The Hollywood Reporter calling the integration “agonizingly unsubtle” in nature. That review also notes the multiple “Paramount plugs,” particularly in relation to Miller’s love of movies. His teenage bedroom is practically a shrine to Paramount Pictures releases of yesteryear—some more realistic for an adolescent boy to idolize (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Patriot Games) than others (who showed this kid Terms of Endearment?).
Vanity Fair has reached out to representatives for both Paramount Pictures and AMC Theatres, but has yet to hear back about the terms of a potential partnership. But it’s not hard to draw the connection, given that AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron said that he expects Paramount to increase its theatrical release slate under the leadership of chairman and CEO David Ellison following the company’s sale to Ellison’s Skydance Media in August. Ellison told CNBC at the time that “we’re going to invest into our studios business” with Paramount releasing 6 to 8 movies next year, and increasing to 15 in 2027.
On Wednesday, Aron touted that Regretting You was “among the first movies to come out” under Ellison’s leadership alongside co-CEO George Cheeks, calling both men “dear friends of AMC.” His words seemed to indicate a burgeoning collaboration between the two—a way of promoting the theatergoing experience from within one studio’s movies.
It’s a question that Hollywood has long been asking itself: What will it take to bring audiences back to the movies? The one-two punch of streaming and the pandemic has left the filmgoing industry in flux—with theater chains scrambling to find a solution. In the last few years, Tom Cruise and Taylor Swift have lent their star power to the cause, and the proliferation of in-house bars and novelty popcorn buckets has given some incentives for leaving one’s home to see a film.
The closest AMC ever came to generating genuine buzz around moviegoing was with its viral Nicole Kidman ad. (It was parodied by everyone from Olivia Rodrigo to the cast of Saturday Night Live. “I’ll do anything for cinema, so meme me as much as you want,” Kidman said at the time.) Perhaps overestimating people’s willingness to wait around for their favorite Oscar-winning Aussie, AMC announced over the summer it would show more ads before movies, then quickly reversed course following backlash. There were no advertisements before my press screening of Regretting You at the AMC Empire in New York City’s Times Square, but watching our Gen Z protagonists repeatedly connect over their love of movies, there was a meta kind of nostalgia for summers spent in theaters as a kid. The same warm-and-fuzzy feeling that takes over when Kate Winslet and Jack Black wander the aisles of Blockbuster in The Holiday (2006).
In Regretting You, characters spend an inordinate amount of time in an AMC, yes, but they also watch movies together on a projector in their backyard, and use the idea of a midday double feature as an excuse to skip school. It’s product placement that, cheesily enough, promotes the act of theatergoing itself. The movie is estimated to earn $8 million to $10 million off a $30 million budget—a minuscule piece of the film industry’s much larger puzzle. But two more Hoover adaptations are headed for theatrical release next year—March’s Reminders of Him, followed by Anne Hathaway–starring Verity in May 2026. And with them, increasingly rare opportunities to remember that we once came to these spaces for magic.
