As the old saying goes, first comes love, and then comes marriage. So, while a lot of people might watch movies on a date this Valentine’s Day, thoughts of marriage don’t linger too far behind.
What better genre for lovers to watch than wedding movies? From dramas to comedies to even horror, movies about the big day show the lengths couples will go to make their dreams come true, for better or for worse. For any couples who need a nudge to take the plunge — or need a good reason to avoid matrimony altogether — great wedding movies will do the trick.
1. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
The Philadelphia Story begins with a face-off between married couple C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) and Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn). Then, jumping two years later, Tracy extolls the happiness of the single life, expressing no regret about her dissolved marriage.
That’s an odd place for a movie about a wedding to start, but director George Cukor and writer Donald Ogden Stewart, adapting the play by Philip Barry, use that opening to set the stage for their marital farce. Upon learning that Tracy plans to marry George Kittredge (James Stewart), Dexter accompanies a reporter covering the marriage and realizes he’s not quite ready to let his ex move on.
2. Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
Written and directed by P. J. Hogan, a man who will soon appear again on this list, Muriel’s Wedding begins with a ceremony gone wrong, at least for the titular character (played by Toni Collette). After catching the groom in a moment of indiscretion, the awkward Muriel’s life takes a turn for the bizarre. These misadventures lead Muriel to her own nuptials, which involve hurt feelings new and old.
While neither ceremony goes the way that Muriel intended, they both teach her how to love herself, regardless of what society says.
3. Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
Few movies have a more accurate title than Crazy Rich Asians, the story of American economics professor Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), who travels to the Singapore home of her boyfriend Nick Young’s (Henry Golding) family home for a wedding. Starting with the private cabin they enjoy for their overnight flight and continuing up to when she sees the estate of Nick’s mother, Elenor (Michelle Yeoh), Rachel comes to realize that her boyfriend comes from outrageous money.
Although director Jon M. Chu, working from screenwriters Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim’s adaptation of the Kevin Kwan novel, lets the wedding and Nick’s proposal plans drive the plot, the true tension comes between Rachel and Elenor, as the former hopes to win the approval of the latter.
4. My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
Jules and Michael care about marriage. They cared so much that they made a pact that if the two remained unmarried by their 28th birthdays, they would wed one another. And then, mere weeks before she hits that fateful age, Michael (Dermot Mulroney) calls Jules (Julia Roberts) to announce his engagement to Kimmy (Cameron Diaz).
For the rest of My Best Friend’s Wedding, Jules does everything she can to prevent the wedding from happening. Muriel’s Wedding director P. J. Hogan returns with a script by Ronald Bass for more matrimonial mishaps.
5. Sabrina (1954)
Although Hollywood remade Sabrina in 1995 with Harrison Ford, the definitive version remains the 1954 original from the great writer and director Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ernest Lehman and Samuel A. Taylor.
Audrey Hepburn stars as Sabrina Fairchild, the daughter of a chauffeur who has always loved David (William Holden), the aloof son of her father’s rich employer. After returning from overseas a sophisticated woman, Sabrina catches the attention of David, now engaged to society woman Elizabeth (Martha Hyer).
As David’s ill-tempered older brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart) tries to keep Sabrina away from David so the wedding will go through, he finds himself falling for her, adding a new complication.
6. Looking: The Movie (2016)
For two seasons, the HBO series Looking followed the lives of three gay men — Patrick (Jonathan Groff), Dom (Murray Bartlett), and Agustín (Frankie J. Alvarez) — living in San Fransisco. Set a year after the season finale, Looking: The Movie finds Patrick returning to San Fransisco for Agustín’s wedding to Eddie (Daniel Franzese), full of questions.
Director Andrew Haigh, who co-wrote the script with Looking creator Michael Lannan, lets Patrick and his friends wrestle with the very idea of marriage, getting some help along the way from a wise Justice of the Peace played by Tyne Daly.
7. Bridesmaids (2011)
Written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo and directed by Paul Feig, Bridesmaids announced itself as a raunchy movie for women. Despite that eye-catching tag, Bridesmaids offers a well-observed look at changes in long-standing friendships.
Stuck in the throes of a business failure, Annie (Wiig) looks forward to serving as Maid of Honor for her best friend Lillian (Mya Rudolph). But when she arrives at the festivities, Annie meets Lillian’s new best friend and de facto Maid of Honor Helen (Rose Byrne). In between antics about who should or should not get the title of Maid of Honor, Annie recognizes how she and Lillian have matured into different people.
8. The Wedding Banquet (1993)
The second movie directed by Academy Award winner Ang Lee, The Wedding Banquet, doesn’t have the acclaim given to The Life of Pi or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Rather, the farce The Wedding Banquet shows Lee learning his trade, working with a script that he co-wrote with Neil Peng and frequent collaborator James Schamus.
The Wedding Banquet stars Winston Chao as Gao Wai-Tung, a gay Taiwanese immigrant who lives in the US with his partner Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). Through a dating service employed by his conservative parents, Wai-Tung meets Chinese immigrant Gu Wei-Wei (May Chin), who hides her relationship with a white American from her parents. Together, Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei launch a marriage scheme to satisfy their parents while getting to live as themselves in the US.
9. Ready or Not (2019)
Many wedding movies on this list feature wedding nights gone wrong, but none can match the madness that bride Grace (Samara Weaving) undergoes in Ready or Not. The orphaned Grace gladly marries into the le Domas family, not for the riches they’ve acquired from their game empire but for what she perceives as the bond she’s always wanted. But after the ceremony, Grace learns that family tradition demands that she play a game of hide and seek, one in which her new in-laws will kill her if she’s found.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, working from a script by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, use this premise for a thrilling horror comedy, one that savages the upper classes.
10. Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Even for those not planning a wedding, Rachel Getting Married is a stressful watch. Written by Jenny Lumet and directed by Jonathan Demme, Rachel Getting Married follows troubled Kym (Anne Hathaway) as she leaves rehab to attend her titular sister’s wedding.
Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) plans an affirming and diverse wedding with her fiancé Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), creating tensions that get amplified by Kym’s destructive ways. Demme shoots the film with a handheld camera, which puts the viewer in the center of the chaos, but it also allows the beautiful ending to feel all the more intimate.
11. Royal Wedding (1951)
Director Stanley Donen’s Royal Wedding assumes that Fred Astaire and Jane Powell are not the main event. Instead, it’s the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten, which compels brother and sister dance duo Tom (Astaire) and Ellen Bowen (Powell) to take their show from Broadway to London.
While there, the script by Alan Jay Lerner puts the siblings to all sorts of shenanigans. But the interest for audiences is not the plot any more than it is the wedding. Rather, it’s Astaire and Powell’s outstanding dance numbers.
12. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
“Basically, you’re saying that marriage is just a way of getting out of an awkward pause in conversation,” observes Hugh Grant’s Charles.
Despite that wry observation, Four Weddings and a Funeral takes a positive look at the concept of matrimony. Director Mike Newell and screenwriter Richard Curtis emphasize the sweetness in Charles’s pursuit of the American Carrie (Andie MacDowell), which makes even his most cutting-line play more like a longing for connection than a dismissal of the whole ordeal.
13. Father of the Bride (1991)
Father of the Bride began as a 1949 novel by Edward Streeter and then as a 1950 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Spencer Tracy (and again as a 2022 movie with Andy Garcia. But for most, the definitive version is the 1991 comedy directed by Charles Shyer, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Nancy Meyers.
Steve Martin plays the titular father, a shoemaker whose life gets turned upside down when his daughter Annie (Kimberly Williams) announces her engagement. Shyer and Meyers keep the stakes low, which allows Martin and Diane Keaton, who plays his wife Nina, to maintain a relatable tone.
14. Palm Springs (2020)
With Palm Springs, director Max Barbakow and writer Andy Siara don’t just make a wedding movie. They also make a time loop movie. Walking trainwreck Sarah (Cristin Milioti) thinks she has problems when she goes to her sister’s wedding with all her baggage and bad decisions. It gets worse when she follows party boy Nyles (Andy Samberg) into a strange cave, which locks her in the same time loop that he’s experienced.
As Sarah and Nyles live out her sister’s wedding party again and again, they come to understand the best way to deal with a complicated relationship is to keep moving forward, day after day.
15. Monsoon Wedding (2001)
Director Mira Nair broke out with 1991’s Mississippi Masala, which looked at the complications surrounding a cross-cultural romance. With Monsoon Wedding ten years later, she and writer Sabrina Dhawan showed that marriages in a single culture have their own challenges.
The families of bride Aditi (Vasundhara Das) and groom Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas) want the ceremony to go off without a hitch. But as expectations and budgets get bigger, and past feelings reassert themselves, it takes an act of nature to give everyone perspective again.
16. The Birdcage (1996)
Brides and grooms have been known to make outrageous requests during the lead-up to their big day, but Val (Dan Futterman) has a real doozy for his dad. To avoid ruffling the feathers of his conservative future in-laws (Gene Hackman and Diane Wiest), Val asks his gay father Armand (Robin Williams) to play straight.
Directed by Mike Nichols and written by Elaine May, based on the French farce La Cage aux Folles, The Birdcage has plenty of fun with stereotypes, including Nathan Lane as Armand’s dramatic partner Albert, but it also shows that marriages make for the most unlikely families.
17. Mama Mia! (2008)
For her wedding to Sky (Dominic Cooper), Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) wants her father in attendance. The problem: she doesn’t know which former suitor of her mother Donna (Meryl Streep) has the honor. So she invites all three, the suave Sam (Pierce Brosnan), the free-spirited Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), and the reserved Harry (Colin Firth). The wedding at the center of Mama Mia!, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and written by Catherine Johnson, isn’t the film’s true focus — that honor belongs to the Abba songs belted out by the cast. That said, a wedding might be the best reason to sing ABBA songs.
18. The Five-Year Engagement (2012)
As its name suggests, The Five-Year Engagement, directed by Nicholas Stoller and written by Stoller and star Jason Segel, is about the lack of a wedding. Sous chef Tom (Segel) and PhD student Violet (Emily Blunt) want to tie the knot. But obstacles get in the way, from job prospects to the allure of other partners. The half-decade sojourn to the altar gives Tom and Violet a sneak peek at married life, making their engagement the most realistic of all.
19. Steel Magnolias (1989)
Shelby (Julia Roberts) is ready for a perfect life with her future husband Jackson (Dylan McDermott). But after learning that she has diabetes, which prevents her from having children, Shelby considers calling it off.
The wedding plot at the start of the movie is just one of the many threads that writer Robert Harling and director Herbert Ross follow in Steel Magnolias, an episodic look at the lives of white Southern women (played by Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, and more). However, it serves as the foundation from which all of the other narratives stem, a symbol of the decision to keep moving forward with life, for better or for worse.
20. The Wedding Singer (1998)
As the frontman for a cover band, Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) spends a lot of time at weddings. That experience makes him an expert on the practice, which would have come in handy had his fiancee Linda (Angela Featherstone) not stood him up. When bride-to-be Julia (Drew Barrymore) recruits the jilted Robbie to help plan her wedding to dunderhead Glenn (Matthew Glave), he finds a new reason to believe in love again.
Although the mixture of schmaltz and crude humor soon becomes formulaic in other Sandler comedies, director Frank Coraci and writer Tim Herlihy perfect the approach for The Wedding Singer.
21. Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
For many fans of Joel and Ethan Coen, Intolerable Cruelty ranks near the bottom of their oeuvre, a fact many blame on the fact that they didn’t write a new script and instead worked on an existing project written by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone. However, Intolerable Cruelty features some of the Coens’ favorite themes, including a con man who gets hoisted on his own petard.
That con man is divorce attorney Miles Massey (George Clooney), a cynical man who doesn’t believe in love. Miles runs afoul of Marylin (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a woman who marries rich and divorces rich men, walking away with a chunk of their cash. As the two move from wedding to wedding and play a game of cat and mouse, they find themselves falling for one another.
22. The Best Man (1999)
The characters in The Best Man don’t seem to like marriage very much. Although soon-to-be hit writer Harper (Taye Diggs) comes to New York to serve as the best man in the wedding of his friend Lance (Morris Chestnut), he and his other old pals — the braggart Quentin (Terrance Howard) and the put-upon Murch (Harold Perrineau) — none of them see themselves as faithful.
However, as friends male and female see themselves as characters in Harper’s novel, they also find glimpses of their better selves. Writer and director Malcolm D. Lee sometimes gives the guys a bit too much leeway for some viewers, but The Best Man remains a portrait of the baggage one brings into a marriage.
23. The Proposal (2009)
As this list demonstrates, weddings make for the perfect setting for a false-identity romp. Directed by Anne Fletcher and written by Peter Chiarelli, The Proposal carries on in this tradition. The Proposal features the well-heeled romance movie trope of a driven career woman, in the form of publishing magnate Margaret Tate (Sandra Bullock), who learns to take time for love.
But in this case, the Canadian citizen Margaret gets engaged to keep working in the US. Her unwilling accomplice is her put-upon personal assistant Andrew (Ryan Reynolds), who accepts his boss’s proposal to keep his job. Despite the staged set-up, the two develop feelings for one another, blurring the line between reality and fantasy.
24. Here Comes the Groom (1951)
The 1950s signaled a downturn in quality for Frank Capra, director of classics such as It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But his 1951 film Here Comes a Groom retains some of the charm of his best films, thanks to its goofy wedding plot. Bing Crosby plays Pete, a good-hearted American who lives and works in Paris, where he plans to adopt a pair of orphan children.
Upon learning that the adoption is contingent upon his getting married within five days, Pete returns to America to find his fiancee Emmadel (Jane Wyman), just to learn that she grew tired of waiting for him and has been betrothed to someone else. As Pete tries to win back his love and save the children, viewers see that Capra’s ability to tug on heartstrings remains intact, at least for now.