Love, Yearning, and Bad Decisions in 10 of the Best Romance Movies on Tubi
Meet-cutes are only the beginning when 10 of the best romance movies on Tubi put falling in love through every possible complication.
Romance movies have convinced us of a few things.
One conversation can change your life. Your sworn enemy may be suspiciously attractive. A summer fling can absolutely survive the school year. And when someone says they're definitely not falling in love, we should probably start the countdown.
Part of the fun is knowing the language and falling for it anyway. Give romance lovers a slow burn and we'll wait. Let two characters hold eye contact a second too long and suddenly we're analyzing the look. Put an obvious couple through 90 minutes of emotional avoidance and we'll happily yell at the screen until they figure out what everyone else already knows. The destination may look familiar, but the right chemistry can make getting there feel brand new.
Tubi's Romance collection has plenty of ways to fall hard, so we're narrowing the dating pool to 10 movies that understand love stories don't need to follow the same rules. Some make you wait for the kiss. Others have people falling first and figuring out the rest later.
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Before Sunrise
Meet-cutes don't get much simpler than two strangers on a train.
Jesse and Céline meet while traveling through Europe and make the perfectly reasonable decision to get off together in Vienna despite barely knowing each other. The catch? Jesse has a flight the next morning, giving them one night to wander the city and discover how much two people can learn about each other before sunrise.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy make Before Sunrise feel romantic without needing an elaborate plot to manufacture chemistry. They talk. They walk. They flirt. They debate love, life, relationships, and everything else that seems especially important when you're young and awake far too late with somebody you may never see again. For the yearning crowd, this is required coursework. Every passing hour makes the connection deeper and the goodbye closer.
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Grease
Summer loving had them a blast. Then school started.
Danny and Sandy think their beach romance is over until they discover they've both landed at Rydell High in Grease. Unfortunately, the sweet Danny Sandy met over the summer and the too-cool-for-feelings Danny performing for the T-Birds don't exactly seem like the same guy.
John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John turn that reunion into one of movie musicals' most recognizable romances, surrounded by leather jackets, Pink Ladies, school dances, drag races, and songs that have spent decades refusing to leave the cultural playlist. The romance itself is messy, occasionally ridiculous, and deeply teenage. Good thing breaking into song gives everyone extra time to work through it.
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The Hating Game
Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman cannot stand each other. Sure. We'll pretend to believe them.
Workplace rivals competing for the same promotion turn mutual irritation into something less professional in The Hating Game. Lucy and Josh know exactly how to push each other's buttons, which is usually romance-movie language for “please check back in approximately 30 minutes.”
Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell get to indulge one of romance fandom's favorite pleasures: watching the distance between I hate you and oh no become increasingly small. Enemies-to-lovers requires commitment to the bit. The arguments need chemistry. The competition needs tension. Most importantly, everybody except the people involved should recognize what's happening before they do. Hale and Stowell understood the assignment.
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Poetic Justice
Justice isn't looking for romance. She's trying to live with grief.
Janet Jackson's Justice is a poet and hairstylist mourning the murder of her boyfriend when a road trip from Los Angeles to Oakland puts her alongside Tupac Shakur's Lucky in Poetic Justice. Their first impressions don't exactly scream soulmates, but miles on the road start making room for conversations neither expected to have.
John Singleton lets attraction grow alongside two people carrying very different kinds of hurt. Justice's poetry gives language to feelings she doesn't always say aloud, while Lucky has responsibilities and frustrations of his own. Getting from Los Angeles to Oakland is only half the journey; the other is letting somebody sit beside you long enough to see what's underneath the armor.
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Sidelined: The QB and Me
Football star. Dancer. High school. Wattpad readers already know we're cooking.
Sidelined: The QB and Me brings Tay Marley's online romance to the screen as Dallas, a dancer with big plans for her future, crosses paths with star quarterback Drayton. Attraction comes easily. Fitting another person into the lives they're already building? A bit more harder.
Noah Beck and Siena Agudong give the Tubi Original plenty of contemporary YA-romance energy, complete with sports, ambition, chemistry, and the inconvenient reality that graduation eventually arrives no matter how good the relationship is going. It's a useful reminder that happily ever after isn't always the immediate question. Sometimes it's: what happens after senior year?
Anyone still in a YA mood can keep the watchlist going with our article rounding up some of the best YA movies on Tubi. Bonus for anyone who gets attached: Sidelined 2: Intercepted is already waiting.
Watch NowThink Like a Man
Why have one complicated relationship when you can have several?
Think Like a Man follows multiple couples whose dating lives become connected by Steve Harvey's relationship-advice book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. Once the women begin using the book's advice, the men eventually realize what's happening and decide they can work from the same playbook. Romantic warfare commences.
Taraji P. Henson, Michael Ealy, Gabrielle Union, Regina Hall, Meagan Good, Romany Malco, Terrence J, and Kevin Hart give the ensemble enough different relationship dynamics that there's no single definition of what love is supposed to look like. If anything, their biggest romantic complication is everyone trying to outsmart everybody else. Put the book down. Have the conversation.
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Everything, Everything
First love already has a reputation for making your world feel bigger. For Maddy, that's more literal.
Amandla Stenberg stars as a teenager who has spent most of her life inside because of a medical condition that makes exposure to the outside world dangerous. Then Olly moves in next door in Everything, Everything, and a relationship that begins through windows and messages starts making the world beyond Maddy's home harder to ignore.
Nick Robinson brings an easy warmth to Olly, while Stenberg keeps Maddy's curiosity and desire for independence at the center of the romance. Based on Nicola Yoon's novel, the story taps directly into the YA feeling that meeting one person can make the life you've accepted start looking completely different. Sometimes the person next door feels a whole world away.
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Only You
Faith Corvatch has known the name of her soulmate since childhood. Small issue: she's never met him.
A childhood Ouija board and a fortune teller both point Faith toward the mysterious “Damon Bradley,” a name she carries into adulthood until one extremely inconvenient phone call sends her chasing destiny all the way to Italy in Only You.
Marisa Tomei gives Faith enough romantic conviction to make an international soulmate hunt feel almost reasonable, while Robert Downey Jr. enters the equation and makes the definition of “meant to be” more complicated. Fate, Italian scenery, mistaken identities, and one very persistent idea of who the right person is supposed to be give the movie plenty to untangle before love gets the final word. Soulmate truthers, your table is ready.
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Carol
Sometimes romance announces itself with a grand gesture. Sometimes it's one look across a department store.
Set in 1950s New York, Carol begins when young aspiring photographer Therese meets the elegant Carol Aird while working behind a department-store counter. Attraction develops quietly, but Carol's difficult divorce and the expectations surrounding both women make following it anything but simple.
Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara make restraint part of the chemistry. A glance lasts a beat longer. A hand on a shoulder carries considerably more weight than it should. Conversations say one thing while the space between the words is busy saying something else. The world around Carol and Therese may insist on deciding what their relationship is allowed to become. Their feelings have other plans.
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But I'm a Cheerleader
Megan is a cheerleader. She has a boyfriend. She wears skirts. Case closed, right?
Her family and friends disagree in But I'm a Cheerleader, sending her to a conversion-therapy program where the attempt to convince Megan she's straight runs into one fairly substantial problem: Graham is there.
Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall give the movie a sweet romance inside Jamie Babbit's candy-colored satire, where aggressively gendered pinks and blues make the institution look as absurd as the ideas it's trying to enforce. Megan's story isn't simply about realizing she likes a girl. It's about realizing that the version of herself everyone else insists upon doesn't fit and discovering that falling for someone can make pretending considerably harder.
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