If you want to breathe new life into the romantic comedy genre, it helps to breathe some old life into it.
At least that appears to be the lesson from the Julia Roberts-George Clooney "Ticket to Paradise," which opened to $16.3 million at the domestic box office this weekend, propelled to a second-place finish behind the Dwayne Johnson superhero film "Black Adam" by the combined star power of seasoned rom-com vets. Despite widespread predictions of the impending extinction of the genre on the big screen, the stronger-than-expected result showed that, for romantic comedy fans, paradise may not be lost quite yet.
When the first trailers for "Ticket to Paradise" appeared this summer, you could be forgiven if you checked the calendar to see what year it was. Everything about the film — its picture-postcard South Pacific setting, its breezy banter, the very presence of the 54-year-old Roberts and 61-year-old Clooney as squabbling divorced parents brought together by the wedding of their daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) — felt like a throwback to an earlier era when such romantic baubles were a staple of moviegoing.
