This article contains spoilers for Materialists.

Some of the very best romantic comedies present themselves as dispatches from the front lines of modern dating and gender relations. They may focus on one specific love story, but they promise to deliver more universal insights about “how we date now.” Think of the way the gold-standard When Harry Met Sally … (1989) surveyed a post-second-wave-feminist world and asked if society was finally at a point where men and women could be friends. But just-OK romantic comedies do this too: In 2011 No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, released within mere months of each other, both set out to explore what the moral panic du jour, “hooking up,” was all about.

Materialists, Celine Song’s new A24 film starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal, joins the proud tradition of romantic comedies–as–trend pieces (or maybe theses, if you want to be generous). The question on its mind is about love and money. Namely: Given the choice between a rich guy and a poor one, which one should you marry? If you’re thinking that you’ve heard that one before, that it’s in fact perhaps one of the classic rom-com dialectics, join the club. Watching the movie, I kept expecting Song to put more of a spin on this familiar debate, to show us why the calculus has changed in 2025. The movie’s treatment (or maybe the A24 marketing department’s treatment) of this choice as a novel one we viewers won’t have considered before has continued to mystify me since I walked out of the theater.

Despite insisting throughout Materialists that she wants to marry a rich man, New York matchmaker Lucy (Johnson) chooses her broke ex-boyfriend (John, played by Evans) over the private equity HNWI (Harry, played by Pascal). This is pretty much always what happens in a rich suitor/poor suitor (as TV Tropes has christened it) situation, whether it’s Titanic, Reality Bites, or Wayne’s World. Song’s film doesn’t flip this script, but there is a difference to note here: how this ending is being received.

Hot takes about how a romantic protagonist ended up with the wrong person have become a fairly common genre of social media post in a landscape where everyone wants to have an opinion, but there’s something else at play in the groundswell of postmovie “Lucy should have chosen Pedro Pascal” contrarianism. TikTok users have collectively diagnosed the movie as a piece of “broke man propaganda,” which is to say, they’re arguing that it encourages women to settle for men who fall somewhere on a spectrum between legit destitute and can’t afford fancy restaurants. (This was one of Lucy’s major issues with John their first time around.) As one TikTok that has earned nearly 100,000 likes puts it, the movie “was nothing but a true-to-life horror film about how trauma and low self-esteem limit women’s choices and send them spiraling back to exes they know can’t give them what they want. Women deserve financial security AND love.” If you were wondering whether TikTok is still obsessed with labeling everything a trauma response, up to and including dating a scrub, the answer is yes.

It’s not crazy to have misgivings about planning a future with someone who can’t seem to get it together professionally or financially, but the more extreme versions of this stance, online, are of a piece with a whole backlash-y set of beliefs about gender that seem to be thriving among young adults in particular. It’s visible everywhere from the “girl dinner” and “girl math” trends, to the prominence of dating coaches who offer retrograde advice about being a “high-value woman,” to those “Too Pretty for a Job” T-shirts. Gen Z seems to have brought gender essentialism back, not just in a “Men should pay for dates” way, but in a “Women had it better when they could just stay home and not work” way.

So it’s a little scary to see so many people argue that the “rich daddy,” as one comment put it, is the obvious choice for Lucy, and that a low salary can and perhaps ought to disqualify a person for love with the same cold efficiency it might for a bank loan. Some of the enthusiasm here likely has to do with said rich daddy being played by Pascal, who currently has more “internet boyfriend” cachet than Evans, whose stock has gradually diminished as the market’s enthusiasm for “the Chrises” has waned. Would the Harry partisans come out of Titanic cheering for Billy Zane or root against Wayne in Wayne’s World? Considering that Mike Myers’ rival in the latter movie, a yuppie with lots of ambition, is played by Rob Lowe at his most devastatingly handsome, I’m thinking yes. Chris Evans is no slouch in the looks department, but if he were, there’s no doubt the film would be facing charges of “ugly man propaganda” too.

Along with the self-appointed propaganda containment squad, I’ve noticed another strain of responses to Materialists. These viewers and critics are offended for almost completely opposite reasons: They thought the film was too capitalist in its viewpoint—that it made Harry’s world look too appealing and normalized Lucy’s priorities around marrying rich. On the Ringer’s podcast The Big Picture, host Sean Fennessey summarized this reaction, which he observed in critical and online responses to the film as “In my Marxist view of society, this movie should be destroyed and sent to Mars.”

Fennessey shared that some people took particular offense to Pascal’s generally kind and pleasant character working in private equity, a detail that financial news outlet Bloomberg also amusingly fretted over, from a somewhat more pro-industry perspective, in a piece headlined “Does Private Equity Make Pedro Pascal Undesirable?” While it’s tempting to remind anyone who thinks that Materialists is too enamored with money that Lucy ultimately picks the poor guy, not the rich guy—Bloomberg clearly didn’t miss that fact—it’s true that the movie does seriously toy with Lucy going the other way.

Though critics’ reviews have been mixed, it’s hard to overstate how skillfully this movie has managed to flummox people who want to hang big arguments about modern life on fictional stories, me certainly among them. More than most love triangles, Evans vs. Pascal was not a foregone conclusion, in which Pascal is some easily dismissed “Baxter” type, and I expect that this was by design. When I go back to the question of what Song was trying to say about this particular moment of dating, and why “Love or money?” struck her as not an overdone animating principle but an exciting one, maybe the polarized responses her film is inspiring are proof that she was on to something.

Lucy does choose love in the end. But she goes further than most supposedly sympathetic romantic comedy heroines would in her flirtation with marrying rich. At one point, Harry calls Lucy a “luxury good,” referring to how the types of people who become her clients want the best in everything, including matchmakers. But marriage itself is increasingly a sign of privilege, a preoccupation mostly of the upper classes. Marrying for love might be the most elusive luxury good of all, but Lucy had to price out the other option too, just in case.