You had me at LOL: some notes for the You’ve Got Mail reboot

Assuming you have already heard about the You’ve Got Mail reboot, you are probably in one of two states. You are either excited that the news might be a signal of a long overdue romcom resurgence, or you are embittered because it’s another sign that Hollywood has run out of original ideas.

I hold absolutely no truck with the latter view. Quite frankly, if there was ever a film in dire need of a reboot, then it’s You’ve Got Mail. The film is almost 28 years old, and it shows every single day of its age. You’ve seen it, you know how it goes. It’s about two people who use the futuristic new technology of email (email is no longer new) to communicate, despite being rival booksellers (nobody reads books any more), and eventually begin a relationship (nobody wants to be in a relationship any more). The whole thing is preposterous. Of course they should try again.

The good news about the reboot is that it seems to be in safe hands. It is to be written by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, who wrote 2010 classic romcom Leap Year, and directed by Jason Orley, who helmed the very sweet I Want You Back from 2022, plus an inexplicably large number of Pete Davidson vehicles. So the real question is: how do you actually go about updating You’ve Got Mail?

The good thing is that the film operates from a classic literary device: people falling in love without knowing the other’s true identity. Indeed, You’ve Got Mail was a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner, which was in turn a remake of Miklós László’s Hungarian 1937 play Illatszertár. Going further back, you can trace the themes through works like 1897’s Cyrano de Bergerac, 1775’s The Rivals and 1598’s Much Ado About Nothing. It’s just the framing that needs updating.

First, let’s bin email altogether. It isn’t new and exciting like it was in the 1990s, and for most of us has simply become the thing where we go to delete promotional Millie’s Cookies marketing messages three times a week. Maybe a smarter way to go in would be via social media. Perhaps two people with anonymised Instagram accounts fall in love or, if that’s too visual, a couple of goobers who just really love Substack. Maybe the film could even move beyond this, and utilise something like Bluetooth or wireless ad hoc network filesharing technology. That would certainly be novel.

And let’s rethink the book element too. In the original You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks played a man whose biggest crime was owning and operating a large physical bookshop, to the consternation of Meg Ryan and her small independent store. And, look, things have changed. All bookshops, big or small, are wonderful and precious things that we must protect at all costs. Being mad at Tom Hanks in 2026 is like being mad at a Waterstones, which is just preposterous. Maybe, just maybe, there is a workaround here. Perhaps we need to think further up the chain and locate the person who has done more to kill off the physical bookshop than anyone. That’s right, I’m suggesting that one of the leads of the reboot should be Jeff Bezos. Listen, it could work.

We now come to casting. And here there is a problem. Almost every single generation since 1998 has been brought up to intrinsically question modern technology. Show a 10-year-old an email from an anonymous and unfamiliar source, no matter how affectionate its content, and their first instinct will be to assume that it is a scam and delete it unread. In fact, the only people old enough to not instantly do this are probably people as old as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are now. So one option would be to keep the leads of the first film, and make it a story about two older scam-plagued people who fall in love while simultaneously giving all their money to mysterious Nigerian princes.

Doesn’t this sound good? Wouldn’t you watch this? Of course you would. Heartfelt sincerity is in short supply these days, and something like a golden-era romcom remake might just be the thing to set the world back on track again. So when You’ve Got Mail 2 comes out, I will be first in line, even though it will almost definitely star Pete Davidson and be called Jeff Bezos Just Airdropped You a Dickpic.