8 Movies To Watch if You Like 'The Love Hypothesis'

Published Oct 5, 2026, 7:20 AM EDT

Jessica is a young writer from Brisbane, Australia. An avid consumer and lover of all things Film and TV, you will never tear her away from a screen. A tendency rooted from childhood, she once had dreams of becoming a member of the famed kids-band 'Hi-5'. Perhaps that's what pushed her to secure an education with a theater background. But now, as dreams evolved, her passions have turned to admiring performances from afar. Frankly, she's just grateful that she can put her binging skills to good use. Outside of work, Jessica recently completed her undergraduate double degree in Arts/Communications. Other than that, she spends most of her free time with family and friends, probably never forgetting to talk about the new movie or show she watched the day prior.

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If you loved The Love Hypothesis, chances are you're here for more than just a cute love story. Ali Hazelwood's bestselling novel has all the ingredients of an irresistible romcom: forced proximity, a brooding leading man, a sunshine heroine focused on her career, and a fake-relationship that becomes considerably more complicated as the characters start catching real feelings. Thankfully, Hollywood has been mining that particular formula for decades.

From fake boyfriends and pretend engagements to workplace rivals and relationships that begin with ulterior motives, these movies deliver plenty of the same romance tropes that made The Love Hypothesis so addictive. Some are sweeter, some are much sillier, and a few take the fake-dating setup in surprisingly different interpretations. Either way, they all understand the joy of watching two people insist they aren't falling in love, while the audience (and everyone around them) know exactly where this is going.

8 'The Valet' (2022)

Image via Hulu

When movie star Olivia Allen (Samara Weaving) is caught by paparazzi with her married billionaire lover, her team convinces hard-working parking attendant Antonio Flores (Eugenio Derbez) to pretend to be her boyfriend in exchange for a good pay out. But what starts as a straightforward arrangement becomes increasingly complicated as the two spend more time together and discover there's more to their supposed opposite worlds than they expected.

The fake-dating setup makes The Valet an obvious companion to The Love Hypothesis, but the movie takes the trope in a completely different direction. Rather than turning Antonio and Olivia into a conventional romantic couple, their relationship becomes a genuine friendship that helps both of them reassess their lives as they figure out what they actually want. In the end, Antonio manages to protect his community and also finds a chance at real love, while Natalie gains the courage to walk away from a toxic relationship—making this a movie that's more interested in the beauty of unexpected connections.

7 'How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days' (2003)

Image via Paramount Pictures

Tired of writing superficial beauty content, magazine writer Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) pitches to write an article about all the things women can do to intentionally drive a man away. Meanwhile, advertising executive Benjamin Barry (Matthew McConaughey) wagers with his colleagues that he could make any woman fall in love with him within ten days. The result of their meeting? A bizarre relationship where neither are aware of each other's ulterior motives.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is a refreshing romcom that turns its usual formula into a battle of wits and competing agendas, with both characters constantly trying to manipulate the relationship to suit their own needs. But that eventual shift from performance to genuine affection is what becomes particularly satisfying, as Andie and Ben can't help but get past the elaborate games they've been playing with each other. For fans of The Love Hypothesis, think of this as another romance where two people enter a relationship for reasons that have nothing to do with love, only to discover that their carefully constructed arrangement has become much harder to control.

6 'Just Go With It' (2011)

Image via Sony Pictures

Danny Maccabee (Adam Sandler) is a successful plastic surgeon who has spent years pretending to be unhappily married so he can avoid committing to a relationship. But when he suddenly meets a (much younger) woman he actually seems to fall for, he enlists the help of his assistant, Katherine (Jennifer Aniston), to take on the role of his soon-to-be divorced wife who can keep up the ruse—even as the lies spiral a lot more than intended.

Just Go With It goes much broader and sillier than The Love Hypothesis, but its romantic setup has the same appeal: two people who already know each other are forced into a pretend relationship, only to gradually discover that the chemistry between them is very much real. In the case of Danny and Katherine, their growing connection is particularly fun because they have spent years getting to know each other's habits, flaws, and lives, without ever seeing each other in a romantic light. Once the fake marriage puts them in a different context, all those familiar details start to look very different. Easily one of Sandler's underrated classics.

5 'The Wedding Date' (2005)

Image via Mandate Pictures

Desperate to avoid attending her younger sister's wedding alone after being dumped by her fiancé, Kat (Debra Messing) hires Nick (Dermot Mulroney), a charming male escort, to pose as her boyfriend for the weekend. Happy to ignore facing her family—and especially her ex—the arrangement seems straightforward enough. That is, until the carefully defined boundaries between the two begin to blur as the festivities go on.

Much like The Love Hypothesis, The Wedding Date gets much of its romantic tension from two people entering a relationship with rules made to keep feelings out of it. Kat thinks she can control the situation. Unfortunately, Nick's easy confidence makes it increasingly difficult for her to remember that the whole thing is supposed to be a paid act. The wedding setting also gives the movie plenty of forced proximity, family pressure, and public displays of affection—all the ingredients needed for a fake romance to become considerably more real than planned.

Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic

Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.

🍂Harry & Sally(1989)

🏀Love & Basketball(2000)

🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)

🚢Titanic(1997)

FIND YOUR ROMANCE →

01

How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.

AWe are friends for years before either of us says anything. BWe want the same thing and neither of us backs down. CNobody can know, including our closest friends. DOne look across a room and everything changes.

NEXT QUESTION →

02

What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.

AWhether this is actually happening, and what to call it. BWhose career comes first this year. CWhether we will ever be honest about this in public. DNothing small. When we fight, it is about everything.

NEXT QUESTION →

03

How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.

AI remember every single thing they have told me. BI show up to the things that matter to them. CI keep their secrets like they are my own. DI would give up something enormous for them.

NEXT QUESTION →

04

What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.

ATiming. We keep finding each other at the wrong moment. BAmbition. We both want big lives and they do not match. CThe world. It is not safe to be open about this yet. DEverybody around us has decided this cannot happen.

NEXT QUESTION →

05

Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.

ASomebody running across a city to say it before midnight. BSomebody in the stands who stayed until the very end. CA look across a crowded room that nobody else catches. DSomebody promising to hold on, and meaning it.

NEXT QUESTION →

06

What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.

AA friendship I could never get back. BThe plan I have had for my life since I was a kid. CMy privacy. All of it would become public. DEverything. I would not think about it for long.

NEXT QUESTION →

07

Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.

AStill talking. We have never run out of things to say. BBuilding something together, both of us still ambitious. CFinally open about it, after years of being careful. DApart, and I still think about it constantly.

NEXT QUESTION →

08

Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.

AI would rather talk to you than anybody else, forever. BI am not giving up either of us. We find a way to have both. CThis is mine, and I am not explaining it to anyone. DI would do the whole thing again, even knowing how it ends.

REVEAL MY ROMANCE →

Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…

Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to be somebody's person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of you.

Harry & Sally

You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most durable way anybody has found to do this.

• When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy, conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
• You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
• The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
• You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.

Love & Basketball

You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the relationship easier.

• This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of them equally seriously.
• You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a rival, and that never entirely goes away.
• It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each other, but whose turn it is this year.
• You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.

Heated Rivalry

The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting somebody you are not supposed to want.

• Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides, meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
• You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things more real than public ones.
• The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what it would cost either one to say it out loud.
• Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally stop hiding.

Titanic

You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version of it.

• Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five days, which is precisely the point of it.
• You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats decades of something merely comfortable.
• The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an enormous life afterwards because of it.
• You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the same way.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

4 'To All The Boy I Loved Before' (2018)

Image via Netflix

Lara Jean Covey (Lana Condor) is a shy high-school student who writes secret love letters to every boy she's ever had feelings for. But when those letters are accidentally mailed out, Lara Jean is suddenly forced to confront the boys she has spent years quietly crushing on—including her sister's ex-boyfriend. As a result, to avoid all that mess, she agrees to enter a fake relationship with one of her letter's recipients, Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo).

To All the Boys I've Loved Before is one of the clearest matches for The Love Hypothesis because the fake-dating contract isn't just a plot device—it's what actually gives the romance room to develop. Lara Jean and Peter set rules for their relationship, and yet, by simply spending time together, the two gradually expose sides of each other that neither had ever seen before. In many ways, their connection gets much of its charm from watching Lara Jean becoming more comfortable with vulnerability, turning what begins as a convenient arrangement into a relationship she actually takes a chance on. A true gem of the modern romcom era, if we do say so ourselves.

3 '10 Things I Hate About You' (1999)

Image via Buena Vista Pictures

Frustrated that her father refuses to let her date before her older sister does, Bianca (Larissa Oleynik) realizes that her romantic prospects hinge on finding someone willing to take on her intimidating (and highly outspoken) sister, Kat (Julia Stiles). Enter Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), a mysterious new student who is paid to date Kat, only for the arrangement to become complicated when genuine feelings start getting involved.

The fake-dating element is only one part of what makes 10 Things I Hate About You such a great companion to The Love Hypothesis. Like Adam and Olive, Kat and Patrick initially have plenty of reasons to distrust each other, especially since their relationship is being shaped by an arrangement that no one expects to become genuine. The movie also understands the appeal of a romance where the characters are smart, stubborn, and more complicated than their first impressions suggest. Add Ledger's effortless charm, Stiles' brilliant performance, and a surprisingly heartfelt emotional payoff, and you've got a romcom that still knows exactly how to make the slow shift from irritation to attraction work.

2 'Set It Up' (2018)

Image via Netflix

Overworked and exhausted assistants, Harper (Zoey Deutch) and Charlie (Glen Powell) realize that their lives might become considerably easier if their demanding bosses start dating each other. As a result, they secretly engineer a series of encounters designed to make the unlikely couple fall in love. What they don't expect is how their scheme finds them navigating a close bond they never planned on having themselves.

The workplace setting makes Set It Up particularly easy to recommend to fans of The Hypothesis. Harper and Charlie have their own careers and ambitions, but they're also stuck dealing with bosses who consume almost every waking hour of their lives, creating plenty of opportunities for late nights, shared frustrations, and workplace banter. Plus, their romance develops alongside the matchmaking plot, giving the movie that satisfying feeling of watching two people slowly realize that the person they've been spending all their time with might actually be the one they're looking for. It's easily Netflix's best romcom.

1 'The Proposal' (2009)

Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Desperate to keep her job as a high-ranking book editor and avoid being deported back to Canada, the demanding Margaret Tate (Sandra Bullock) hastily exclaims that she's engaged to her assistant, Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds). Faced with an odd opportunity, Andrew agrees to continue the ruse only if Margaret gives him a promotion. Unfortunately, this requires them to travel to Alaska and meet his family as an immigration agent sets out to test the reality of their relationship.

The fake engagement gives The Proposal almost everything fans of The Love Hypothesis could want: an icy, intimidating career woman, a reluctant romantic partner, constant bickering, forced proximity, and two people who are far more compatible than they initially realize. Sure, Margaret and Andrew's relationship is built around a lie, but the time they spend together gradually strips away their professional personas, slowly revealing why their bizarrely work so well as a couple. Better still, Bullock and Reynolds have the kind of effortless comedic chemistry that makes every argument and awkward encounter feel like flirting. It's enemies-to-lovers at its finest—especially with a supporting cast that brilliantly fans its flames (we're looking at you, Betty White).

The Proposal