In The Boy Next Door, it was a horror. In The Graduate, it was a blockbuster scandal. In Harold and Maude, it was bizarre. In How Stella Got Her Groove Back, it was how Stella got her groove back. But on streaming platforms in 2024, a gorgeous, established, middle-ish-aged woman sleeping with a much younger, attentive, virile man who’s obsessed with her and just wants to touch her lower back and make her feel seen is … pretty much par for the course. We’re in a season of heterosexual age-gap films, people, and you’re not gonna believe this, but the women are playing the part of Leonardo DiCaprio. Ladies are getting laid. They’re crossing generational lines, and they’re doing it all for the plot.
First, in May, Anne Hathaway did it with a pop star a decade and a half her junior (canonically speaking) in The Idea of You on Prime Video. Then, in A Family Affair on Netflix, Nicole Kidman’s character touted a 16-year age difference with Zac Efron (playing a fictional version of Zac Efron), and everyone keyboard-screamed, “Didn’t I just watch this movie with Anne Hathaway?” But this was no Friends With Benefits–No Strings Attached copycat movie fluke. Because now, we enter the fall season with a brand-new streaming May-December romance film: In Lonely Planet, premiering Friday on Netflix, Liam Hemsworth’s 30-something finance guy tells Laura Dern’s 50-something award-winning author on a writers retreat in Morocco that he knows she has—ahem, had—a partner because he read it on her Wikipedia page. “You googled me?” she asks, practically purring. While each of these movies has a different take on the trending age-gap trope, they all honor this one universal truth: The hottest thing a straight man can do is be genuinely curious about the woman sitting across from him. And an older woman? She actually requires such a curiosity—such a hotness—before even taking a second glance at any such Hemsworth’s jawline.
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These movies and their successful heroines and sensitive love interests make aging feel aspirational instead of something to be dreaded and delayed by Botox (to be fair, Botox does play a large part in the glamorous appeal of the facially ageless A-listers who’ve starred in the films thus far). But that’s what I love about these age-gap movies: Their heroines are successful enough to afford a Nancy Meyers kitchen, autonomous enough to accept nothing less than what they deserve, confident enough to simply pluck any chin whiskers that may come along, and wise enough to know their place in the world. And those mid-20s to mid-30s men who happen to enter their orbits? Well, they stay the saaaame age.
Kidman, by the way, intends to keep the 2024 age-gap romance alive and well with Babygirl, a kinky film inexplicably premiering this Christmas. And Anne Hathaway may just do it all over again herself, in the same sumptuous designer wardrobe that Solène first brought us in The Idea of You, if Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon MGM Studios, is to be believed in this accidentally hilarious quote she gave to Variety about the likelihood of a sequel: “We’re definitely in business with director Michael Showalter—who’s not a woman, but he certainly did an incredible job bringing a very female story to light—and we see him as a preferred partner on some other things in the romantic comedy space.”
Older women courting younger men on-screen right now isn’t just horny, or easy, or drawing from an insanely deep well of Wattpad IP—it’s also good business. Even for non-women like Michael Showalter! Actresses over 35 want to make fun movies every once in a while, and several generations of people would also like to watch those fun, not necessarily critically acclaimed movies. Like … 25 million to 50 million movie-streaming people would like to watch them. Please.
And this isn’t to say that these are the first “Ladies Gettin’ Laid” movies ever made. There are the aforementioned Mrs. Robinson, and Maude, and Stella—and Reese Witherspoon had a turn in Home Again (if you’re keeping score at home, that’ll be a Big Little Lies royal flush once Shailene Woodley ages into the role). The legacy goes all the way back to the original cougar (before the term existed), Jane Wyman, in All That Heaven Allows. But it is to say that these movies are suddenly coming fast and frisky, in a way that suggests an actual shift in the culture. Twice is a coincidence, but three is a pattern, and Laura Dern makes a bona fide age-gap trope. Enemies to lovers, you’ve met your match; she’s effortlessly chic, he is somehow both young and wealthy, and one of them is famous. Cougarcore is here to stay, and whether it kicked off with May December (Todd Haynes’s 2023 Oscar-nominated dark comedy that fictionalized real-life events) or MILF Manor (a real-life 2023 reality show that was somehow not based on the 30 Rock parody MILF Island) is up for debate. But there’s no question that Hollywood’s A-listers are reclaiming these stigmatized terms one rom-com at a time.
And let’s face it: Older men have been dating decades-younger women in movies since the beginning of time. We’ve all seen the Tom Cruise graph. Leading men age and age and age, but their costars stay frozen in 27-year-old amber, and those situations aren’t ever called May-December movies; they’re just called the Mission: Impossible franchise. Age-gap relationships are a way of the world—but they’re a way of the world in all directions. So why shouldn’t Laura Dern have a turn making out with Liam Hemsworth in an alleyway in a near shot-for-shot remake of Call Me by Your Name while Under the Tuscan Sun-ning it on a dreamy writers retreat in Morocco, freed from the burden of the fact that when her excellent acting meets excellent writing, it results in memes so iconic that they will likely outlive her and the legacy of the films they came from?
You really don’t have to worry about that with Lonely Planet. This really is just an older woman making out with a younger hunk (and some sex, and some tasteful f-bombs—these are adults, after all). But off-screen, it’s a little deeper than that. “Cougar” is a term that’s been stigmatized, and “MILF” is a novelty phrase popularized by a teen comedy about fucking an apple pie. Judging women who date younger men as sexual deviants is just one of the ways that we objectify women. There is nothing objectifying about watching Anne Hathaway become Nicholas Galitzine’s muse or watching Liam Hemsworth and Liam Hemsworth’s jaw become Laura Dern’s muse (the arts are very important to the age-gap genre). Normally, reclaiming the terms and tactics that oppress is hard work. But these A-listers have made it a fun side job in between their Oscar nominations.
Make no mistake—Nicole Kidman has no trouble booking roles. As observed on her IMDb page, she has filmed a movie or TV series just about every year of her life since she started working, and some stone-cold bangers at that. But A-listers move a little differently now, and these women are placing themselves at the forefront of “one for them, one for me.” If Nicole Kidman just banged out six gut-wrenching episodes of Expats and wants to have a little Netflix tryst with Zac Efron as a treat—while her real-life husband, Keith Urban, presumably watches along in glee—she can. I mean, she already peed on Zac Efron in a campy cult classic. This is just the natural progression.
And the more women of a certain age get happily, hotly, hornily laid on-screen, the less of a monolith the genre becomes, until one day it’s just as normal a part of Hollywood as it is a part of life. In the three 2024 movies at the foundation of this budding genre, Anne Hathaway cares about the optics of the age gap, Laura Dern never mentions it once—her complete lack of doubt that she should be fucking Liam Hemsworth and that it makes perfect sense for him to be obsessed with every wonderful thing about her is the best part of Lonely Planet—and Nicole Kidman is a woman rediscovering her identity outside of being a mother. “Who was I before I was everything to everyone else?” she asks Kathy Bates (Kathy Bates!) in A Family Affair. What these movies all have in common, outside of May-December romances, is a fun and flirty focus on women of a certain age. They’re not sad; they’re not lonely; they haven’t wasted their lives. They’re just falling in love and getting laid. (And we get to watch them do both.)
In the real world, older women are desired by younger men, and that should be reflected in Hollywood, where older women are somehow discarded at an even more rapid rate when they age out of the ability to conceivably play a high school student (28) and into the ability to play a high school student’s mother (29). Who was I before I was everything to everyone else? It’s important to ask. It’s also important to drink wine during the golden hour on a seaside porch and draw a cardigan around your lithe frame when a chilly breeze cuts through the weave, to establish physical and emotional intimacy through the art of montage, and to have an unexpected but ecstatic afternoon delight with Zac Efron.
These movies do all of that, and they do it for us. Thankfully, the thing that will surely escalate the Ladies Gettin’ Laid genre to the greatest of rom-com heights is already in the works. The rom-com queen herself, Renée Zellweger, is set to return to the Bridget Jones franchise, where she will meet cute (possibly via a dating app) and May-December with Leo Woodall in a movie that is aptly titled Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. The work of reclaiming the cougar is not done, but it is in good hands.
