Here at Holden, the one thing we love almost as much as movies about jewelry is movies about weddings. We've rounded up our favorite wedding movies here - if you've got more to add, please let us know!
1. The Wedding Planner
Jennifer Lopez. Matthew McConaughey. A broken shoe. A heroic rescue from oncoming traffic. A woman falls (literally and figuratively) for a man…only to find out she’s his wedding planner. Turns out wedding planning isn’t that fun when you have a crush on the groom! Reigning queen of rom-com best friends Judy Greer is in this movie as well. The alchemy of a perfect romantic comedy!
2. Wedding Crashers
I was all set to talk about this Judd Apatow classic until I learned he (surprisingly!) had nothing to do with this movie! This Apatow-esque flick follows two, well, wedding crashers, played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. They show up uninvited to weddings in order to pick up women who are swept away by the romance of the wedding. It’s a pretty good (read: kinda gross and opportunistic) strategy…until one of them falls in love. Hilarity (and romance!) ensue.
3. Crazy Rich Asians
This movie tells the story of Rachel, whose boyfriend Nick invites her to his hometown of Singapore for his childhood friend’s wedding. Once they arrive, Rachel discovers that Nick is, as the title implies, crazy rich. Nick’s mother doesn’t think Rachel is good enough for her son, the fashion in this movie is off the charts, and Awkwafina is hilarious. What more could you need? Oh, maybe one of the most breathtaking wedding scenes I’ve ever seen.
4. The Wedding Singer
In the first of THREE Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler collaborations, Sandler plays a wedding singer and Barrymore a waitress. Despite their chemistry, they’re both engaged to other people…until Adam is stood up at the altar. Turns out Drew's fiancé is a grade A creep. Where could the movie possibly go from here?!
5. Jenny’s Wedding
In this film, Kathryn Heigl puts aside her 27 bridesmaid dresses (if you know you know) and announces an upcoming wedding of her own. Unbeknownst to her parents, her partner of choice is a woman. Will her family accept and celebrate their daughter’s sexuality before her wedding? I’m excited to include this film on this list, as there are so few movies that focus on queer stories and even less representation out there of queer weddings.
6. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Joey Fatone from *NSYNC is in this movie! That should be all you need to know, but to summarize: a Greek-American woman falls in love with a non-Greek man (not Joey Fatone but Aidan from Sex and the City), and her family is initially reluctant to accept him. This movie taught me two things from a young age that are definitely not true: Windex is an excellent first aid mechanism (false!) and being single at thirty means you’re doing something wrong (unbelievably false!).
7. Four Weddings and a Funeral
This movie is about - you guessed it - four weddings and a funeral. If I’m being totally frank, if you want to see Hugh Grant fall in love with a beautiful American in a movie directed by Richard Curtis, I’d steer you towards Notting Hill. Yes, I’m obsessed with Julia Roberts. Have you seen the way her smile lights up a room? Since a minor character only references a random engagement one time, I tragically couldn’t put Notting Hill on this list. And yet! I still managed to talk at length about it. Anyway, Four Weddings and a Funeral is fine. Moving on!
8. Jumping the Broom
Marriage is a beautiful celebration of love, but what if the in-laws just can’t seem to get along? Two families come together on Martha’s Vineyard for a wedding weekend, but tensions soar between the groom’s Brooklyn family and the bride’s Cape Cod kin. One such conflict comes down to whether the couple will perform the Black tradition of jumping over a broom during the ceremony. With this inter-family chaos, whether or not they'll even make it through the weekend remains to be seen.
9. Palm Springs
Imagine being stuck in a time loop, forced to live the same wedding over and over. Now imagine being stuck in that time loop with someone you have a lot of fun with. Still a nightmare, or possibly the makings for an epic love story? Think of this movie as a darker Groundhog Day for Millennials.
10. Plus One
First of all, if you haven’t seen PEN-15, run to the nearest Hulu subscription. Second, see star Maya Erskine take on a different role (one in which she does NOT play an awkward middle schooler) in this film where she stars opposite Jack Quaid, son of none other than Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid. Two friends decide to be each other’s plus ones at the slew of weddings they have coming up (ah, to be in your late twenties/early thirties).
11. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
It’s a stretch, but I'm pretty sure there’s a pending wedding floating around in the plot here somewhere. Two women fall in love on an island while one is commissioned to paint a portrait of the other. The woman being painted is engaged (I think? She forgot her man for the duration of the movie and so did I!). This film does fit the stereotype that most queer female films are sad period pieces (see SNL’s skit on this), but it’s still beautiful.
12. Cinderella
Helloooo, Brandy as Cinderella and Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother! Assuming you know the plot and we can skip it, a few casting notes: Whoopi Goldberg as the queen! Victor Garber (aka Professor Callahan - ew!) as the king! George Costanza - I mean Jason Alexander - as the prince’s assistant! Broadway diva Bernadette Peters as the evil stepmother! Again: Whitney Houston. Need I say more?
13. Sweet Home Alabama
This could be considered more of a divorce movie than a wedding movie, but I’m leaning in and counting it. Prior to tying the knot, NYC businesswoman Melanie returns to her hometown in, you guessed it, Alabama. Turns out she’s still married to her childhood sweetheart, so she needs to finalize the divorce before she can move forward with her big day. But she’s got insane chemistry with her ex...so is it really over?
14. Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
Following Mia Thermopolis once she’s got the princess training (sort of) down, it’s time for her to get married due to some very out of date Genovian bureaucracy. Boo! Let her stay single if she wants! That being said, this movie is great. If you want to see Julie Andrews mattress surf (yes, really), this is the movie for you. Jury is still out on whether or not she used a stunt double, but I personally think Maria Von Trapp probably does all her own stunts.
15. Mamma Mia
A sentence I never thought I’d write: Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan in an ABBA movie musical! This movie is set on an island in Greece, where a young bride-to-be plans her upcoming wedding. She has the full support of her mother (MERYL!), but she also wants to invite her father to the celebration. The problem is, she doesn’t know which of her mom’s exes is her dad, so she secretly invites all of them.
16. Guess Who?
In this contemporary spin of 1967 Sidney Poitier/Kathryn Hepburn film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, a woman invites her new boyfriend to her parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. They’ve just gotten engaged and are excited to share the news with her parents. The only problem is, she and her family are Black, and she hasn’t told them yet that her new beau is White. Bernie Mac plays the father figure who does not want Ashton Kutcher taking up with his daughter Zoe Saldana (a stacked cast!).
17. The Runaway Bride
Full disclosure, I have not actually seen this movie. That being said, it’s definitely about weddings and it definitely has Julia Roberts in it (I know this due to the name of the movie and the fact that the poster has a photo of Roberts in a wedding dress). Richard Gere and Julia Roberts falling in love again after the huge success of Pretty Woman? Willing to endorse sight unseen!
18. My Best Friend’s Wedding
Oops, I’m talking about Julia Roberts again! In this movie, best friends (hence the title) Jules and Michael agree to get married if they’re both single at 28. Weeks before her 28th birthday, Michael tells Jules he’s engaged…and getting married in four days. Of course this is the exact moment Jules realizes he’s the love of her life, so she heads to the wedding in order to sabotage it. Watch the movie to find out what happens (and to see an entire restaurant sing “I Say a Little Prayer”).
19. Bridesmaids
Unlike Wedding Crashers, this actually IS a Judd Apatow movie! Lilian (Maya Rudolph) asks best friend Annie (Kristen Wiig) to be her maid of honor. Annie tries to organize everything, but it goes catastrophically wrong (the onset of food poisoning while wedding dress shopping makes for a particularly memorable scene). There’s tension when Lilian’s other bridesmaid Helen (Rose Byrne) steps in, but can everyone get their act together by the wedding?
20. Schitt’s Creek
Yes, I know this last one isn’t a movie, but the final episode of Schitt’s Creek is so sweet that it’s worth watching all 79 other episodes (only 39.5 hours!) in order to get invested in the Rose family. The show ends with *spoiler* a wedding. This is a general comment on the show and NOT a spoiler, but the unfussy yet gentle way this show handles LGBTQ+ topics makes it one of the best shows to have graced my television.
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