One of the conventions of romantic comedy films is the contrived encounter of two potential romantic partners in unusual or comic circumstances, which film critics such as Roger Ebert or the Associated Press' Christy Lemire have called a "meet-cute" situation. During a "meet-cute", scriptwriters often create a humorous sense of awkwardness between the two potential partners by depicting an initial clash of personalities or beliefs, an embarrassing situation, or by introducing a comical misunderstanding or mistaken identity situation. Sometimes the term is used without a hyphen (a "meet cute"), or as a verb, as in "to meet cute."
In many romantic comedies, the potential couple comprises polar opposites, two people of different temperaments, situations, social statuses, or all three (It Happened One Night), who would not meet or talk under normal circumstances, and the meet cute's contrived situation provides the opportunity for these two people to meet.
In movies, the attraction between the lead characters must be established quickly. The subject matter of romantic comedies are the obstacles that the potential pair must face before they can acknowledge, fulfill, or consummate their love, and the audience must care about the relationship enough to finish the movie. The meet-cute, by virtue of its unusual situation, helps to fix the potential relationship in the viewers' minds, and the spark of the meeting is the impetus by which initial vicissitudes of the developing relationship are overcome.
In the film The Holiday (2006), Eli Wallach's character Arthur Abbott (a Hollywood screenwriter) described a meet-cute by saying "Say a man and a woman both need something to sleep in and both go to the same men's pajama department. The man says to the salesman, I just need bottoms, and the woman says, I just need a top. They look at each other and that's the meet-cute."
- Characters in love are distracted and liable to do un-predictable things for humorous purposes.
- The plot of a rom-com will usually see an un-conventional (some times conventional) couple taken through a series of obstacles designed to keep them apart, until the ending when they end up together.
- Happy ending.
- Target audience: Universal women and teenagers.
- Typical male and female, heterosexual relationships.
- Romantic music.
- Stereotypical gender/sexuality roles.
- Attractive protagonists.
- Cliché
- Costume is appealing to the opposite sex or stereotypical to the character.
- Scenes of intimacy.
- Use of colours like red, pink and white which connote love, femininity, innocence, purity, passion etc…
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