Hollywood's First Webcomic Movie

The trailer for a new movie called Marry Me dropped yesterday. The movie, directed by Kat Coiro, is scheduled to be released on February 11, 2022 (the Friday before Valentine's Day) and features Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. Lopez will also be releasing album that will serve as a soundtrack for the film. The reason why I'm mentioning it here is because it's based on a webcomic of the same name!

Marry Me was created by Bobby Crosby in 2012. It's written by Crosby and drawn by Remy "Eisu" Mokhtar. The tag line/description on the site reads: "A world-famou pop star, frustrated with her love life, marries a random fan holding a MARRY ME sign at one of her concerts." The story completed in 2017. I can't seem to find when exactly it got optioned for a movie, but Lopez signed on in 2019. Interestingly, but not at all surprisingly, all of the pieces I can find about it say the movie is based on a "graphic novel" with a few sources adding "online" as a descriptor; the word "webcomic" is never used even on comic news sites.

As far as I'm aware, this is the first feature length Hollywood movie based on a webcomic. There have been a few Japanese, Chinese, and South Korean movies based on webcomics, and some direct-to-video/streaming releases in the US, but this appears to be the first time Hollywood has taken real notice of webcomics as platform. (After writing this whole post, I went back to see that Gary notes We Bare Bears, but I don't feel it counts. The movie was created because of the TV show's success. It wasn't gambling on a cool-sounding webcomic; it was a proven success on TV. I can almost guarantee not one executive tied to the movie saw/heard of its webcoic origins.) If Marry Me does well (it's got some reasonably bankable star power so I don't see why it wouldn't) this could open the door for others. I don't know that it'll be floodgates, exactly, given how much everyone seems to be leaning on "graphic novel" and expressly avoiding "webcomic" but I think it's fair to say we'll start seeing more webcomics get the movie treatment with increasing regularity now.

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