Some movies are tied so closely to the decade they came from that revisiting them years later feels like opening a time capsule. Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion certainly has plenty of the ’90s in its DNA, but somehow Romy and Michele themselves never got stuck there. People still love these two. Nearly 30 years after Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow first played the best friends, fans are still quoting the movie, talking about those dresses and laughing about one of the worst lies anyone could possibly tell at a high school reunion. Yes, we’re talking about Post-it Notes. Now, after all that time, Sorvino and Kudrow are finally getting to do it again in Romy and Michele 2.
Romy and Michele 2 gives fans the reunion they wanted
Technically, Romy and Michele have been back before.
Romy and Michele: In the Beginning arrived in 2005 and told a story set before the original movie, but it didn’t bring Sorvino and Kudrow back to the characters. For people who associated Romy and Michele with those two actresses, it wasn’t quite the same thing.
This time it is. Romy and Michele 2 puts Sorvino and Kudrow back together, and there are quite a few familiar faces joining them. Alan Cumming, Janeane Garofalo, Camryn Manheim and Julia Campbell are also returning from the original cast.
That alone gives this sequel a different feeling. We’re not watching a new group try to recreate what worked the first time. We’re catching up with people we actually knew from the original movie, only now almost three decades have passed. That’s a lot of life between reunions.
Why people never stopped watching Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion
The original movie had such a simple setup that it almost sounds strange explaining it today.
Romy and Michele were going to their high school reunion. They wanted everybody back home to believe they had become wildly successful, and when reality wasn’t impressive enough, they decided to improve the story a little. Actually, they improved it a lot.
Claiming they invented Post-it Notes obviously didn’t work out quite as planned, but that’s only part of why the movie was funny. Romy and Michele were trying so hard to get approval from people who had made them miserable years earlier. They wanted to prove that everybody had underestimated them.
Eventually, they figured out they didn’t really need to prove much of anything. They liked who they were. More importantly, they liked each other. For all the jokes, clothes and strange conversations, the friendship between Romy and Michele was always what held the movie together. You could laugh at them without ever feeling like the movie was laughing down at them.
Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino have seen the fan love firsthand
When Sorvino and Kudrow appeared together at D23, they talked about something that probably would have been impossible to predict back in 1997: people still care about Romy and Michele.
A lot.
There hasn’t been a long franchise of movies keeping these characters in front of audiences every few years. The original simply stuck around. People who loved it kept watching it, and somewhere along the way another generation started finding it too.
That’s a pretty unusual life for a comedy.
Some fans remember seeing Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion when it was new. Others first discovered Romy and Michele on television or streaming years afterward. None of that seems to matter very much once the movie starts. The jokes still work, the friendship still works and Romy and Michele remain completely, wonderfully themselves.
And Sorvino and Kudrow know exactly how much affection is still out there for them.
Romy and Michele 2 has something the first movie couldn’t have
There’s also something about waiting nearly 30 years that could actually work in the sequel’s favor.
Nobody needs Romy and Michele to be exactly the same women they were in 1997. In fact, seeing how they’ve changed is part of the fun. The audience has grown older right along with them, which gives Romy and Michele 2 something a sequel made a few years after the original never could have had.
History. We know how much these characters meant to fans. Sorvino and Kudrow know it too. Now they get to return to that friendship with decades of life behind them and find out what Romy and Michele look like at this point in their lives. Hopefully they’re still making terrible plans together.
Honestly, would we want them any other way?
At D23, Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow opened up about why they think Romy and Michele continue to connect with fans after all these years.
Click on the video below to hear Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow talk about the lasting love for Romy and Michele.
Romy and Michele 2 will premiere in 2027 on Hulu.
You May Also Like:
