This movie, which was released June 25, 1993, clearly did work, earning more than $127 million at the domestic box office and $228 million internationally, on a budget of $25 million, according to the 2017 book I’ll Have What She’s Having.
Writer/director Nora Ephron, who overhauled the script originally penned by Jeff Arch and David S. Ward, and with an assist from her sister Delia Ephron, an associate producer on the film, was nominated for her third Oscar for it. Critics and fans alike continue to rank the movie among the greatest romantic comedies of all time.
The story of Tom Hanks’s Sam, a man who was recently widowed struggling to recover from heartbreak while fathering his 8-year-old son, Jonah (Ross Malinger), connecting over the radio with Meg Ryan’s Annie, a woman who’s found a humdrum partnership but is seeking true love, continues to warm hearts.
Lynda Obst, who was an executive producer on the film and a good friend of Ephron, who died in 2012, tells Yahoo Entertainment her theory: “It holds because of its writing, obviously, because it’s classically written.” Notable exceptions are when Annie uses the computer pre-Google and references to the 1957 romance movie An Affair to Remember, in which the main characters are supposed to meet at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day.
Dana Fox, whose writing credits include Debra Messing’s The Wedding Date and 2022’s The Lost City, with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, rewatched the movie before her conversation
Harper Dill, who co-wrote 2022’s Jennifer Lopez-Owen Wilson movie Marry Me and two dozen episodes of The Mindy Project, estimates that she’s seen Sleepless in Seattle 50 times. The first was in a theater, when she was a child.
It means that even though it breaks the rules of its genre, Sleepless in Seattle holds onto the heart, that coziness of a romantic comedy that Dill mentioned.
“Kind of like an unabashed optimism. There’s no cynicism in it, and I wonder if that’s a product of the time. The world’s OK, we’re not plunging into darkness in the ’90s like we are now,” Dill says. “There’s something that’s so wonderful, and I think that’s why it really remains relevant and beloved is that there’s a levity to it that you need in stories about relationships and love. And I think that the ones that really remain everyone’s favorites have that quality. There’s that aspiration, there’s that hope, there’s that optimism.
“I absolutely love that the last line of the movie is ‘It’s nice to meet you,'” she says. “Just fantastic.”
