Wedding Week: The HitchDied Guide to Wedding Movies

Written by Robin Hitchcock

When I was planning my own wedding in 2010 and 2011, I blogged about the strange experience of getting sucked into wedding-world as an allegedly savvy and feminist chick who nevertheless loves weddings. To round out my personal journey through wedding culture (and have a good excuse to watch and write about movies), I watched and reviewed dozens of wedding movies on HitchDied. I’ve finally compiled a full index for those of you following Bitch Flicks’ wedding movies week.

The HitchDied Guide to Wedding Movies

I’ll also share my general reflections on the wedding movie genre: Weddings are such popular centerpieces for movies because they’re sort of a free pass on logical character behavior. Even in real life, weddings exaggerate emotions and make people do strange things (like spend thousands of dollars on chair rental). So in the movies, weddings are basically an anything-goes wonderland of high drahms. None of the characters have to act realistically or believably and the stakes are always extremely high (“til death do us part”!!!). Wedding movies practically write themselves.

So you have your “I suddenly love this person now that they are marrying someone else!” movies (My Best Friend’s Wedding, Made of Honor), “I am going insane because my sister is getting married and I am still single!” movies (When in Rome, The Wedding Date), your “I’m trying to be a good friend here but engagement has turned you into a pod person” movies (Bridesmaids, Bride Wars), your “Oh crap going to this wedding means confronting people and events from my past!” movies (The Best Man, Rachel Getting Married). Ur-Wedding Movie 27 Dresses hits all of these notes and more! 

Even though I had fun with it, I have to say if you are engaged, you should probably limit your exposure to wedding movies. Because so many of them end with broken engagements or dramatic jiltings at the altar, you’ll start seeing potential wedding saboteurs in all your friends, family, and hired wedding professionals. You’ll see the obviously doomed engagements at the start of those movies and worry that if those characters could be so deluded, are you and your partner as well? You’ll think spending thousands of dollars renting chairs is ok because at least you didn’t invite random strangers from your mother’s past for an ABBA-scored  paternity-off. 

Wedding movies are really silly, and they all kind of follow the same patterns, and as such it’s a shame that they take up so much of a share of the movies Hollywood makes about women. But action movies are really silly and all kind of follow the same patterns, and I certainly don’t want Hollywood to stop cranking those out. Really, I love wedding movies (just like I love weddings) even though—or more honestly, because—they can be absurd.

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Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. Her wedding colors were blush and bashful.