British romcoms such as Notting Hill and Bridget Jones used to woo audiences at home and abroad. Now, film-goers and studios have turned their backs on romance. How did the relationship go so wrong?

Love don’t live here any more. “Here” being the immaculately kept townhouses of west London, home to sweary upper-middle-class romantics prone to airport dashes and damp declarations of love. The British romcom, typified by Richard Curtis and his Working Title collaborations, was our most reliably profitable cinematic export for a considerable – some might say interminable – time. As well as packing UK cinemas, the films were big hits abroad (the global take for the 2003 film Love Actually was $247m (£158m), Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001), $282m, Notting Hill (1999), $364m) and led to Hugh Grant becoming every American’s idea of what to expect from a British man. Inevitably, disappointment followed.

“In the UK – and many international markets – the Working Title films did so well because they were, by and large, well made, and the company was in business with Hugh Grant, a bona fide superstar,” says Jeremy Kay, US editor of Screen Daily.

The films even scored at the Oscars, with Four Weddings and a Funeral wooing its way to a surprise best picture nomination in 1994 and Renée Zellweger getting a nod for best actress in 2001 for playing the wine-guzzling, diary-keeping singleton. But after a string of hits, the kisses dried up and our affection for the subgenre waned. American stars still tried their luck – Kirsten Dunst in Wimbledon (2004), Brittany Murphy in Love and Other Disasters (2006) and, as recently as 2013, Anna Faris in I Give It a Year – but the appetite had evaporated and middling box office results led to fewer and fewer being greenlit, let alone released.

This year’s Man Up, starring Simon Pegg and Lake Bell, hasn’t even made it to £2m in the UK, while Karen Gillan’s Not Another Happy Ending and Love, Rosie, which stars Lily Collins and Sam Claflin, have been even less fortunate. Even About Time, Richard Curtis’s much-publicised return to the genre in 2013, only made it to £7.5m domestically, a far cry from the glory days of Notting Hill’s £30.4m UK total.

But what’s turning off both studios and audiences? In part, it’s a leading-man problem. When Grant abandoned the British romcom for a set of less successful American alternatives, from Did You Hear About the Morgans? to The Rewrite, he left a foppish hole in his wake. Attempts have been made to plug it, from Rafe Spall to Domhnall Gleeson to Pegg, but Grant’s schtick has proved surprisingly difficult to replicate.

“For a while after Four Weddings, much of the successful Working Title output was built around Hugh,” says Ben Roberts, director of the BFI film fund, a body whose coffers have long proved vital to the genre. “I think we are all still looking for someone who has that huge and instant broad appeal and can be an international film star.”

The British archetype of the self-deprecating, slightly stuttery toff is still in rotation, but modern iterations, from Benedict Cumberbatch to Eddie Redmayne, are far too busy playing history-changing code-breakers and physicists to worry about dinner-party faux pas.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hugh Grant, pictured here in Notting Hill, has been surprisingly difficult to replace as a leading man. Photograph: Polygram

The dearth of British romantic comedies is also a reflection of the expanding nature of the domestic film industry. For a while, romcoms and sub-Guy Ritchie gangster flicks were the surest way to pack ’em in. But times changed and ambitions shifted. The British film industry now acts much more like Hollywood, its remit embracing action blockbusters such as Kingsman: The Secret Service, teen comedies such as The Inbetweeners movies and The Woman in Black horror franchise. “There’s a return to a satisfyingly broad perception of our creative chops,” says Kay. “We’ve always made diverse content, but, for a while, these romcoms became synonymous with the cultural identity of British cinema because the brilliant minds at Working Title found extraordinary success with the genre and knew better than anyone else in the UK how to get their movies seen by a global audience.”

But, he says, a more crowded field led to “an explosion of quality content” that’s seen a more diverse distribution of talent. “In recent years we’ve seen the rise of other savvy, well-connected UK producers such as Marv Films, See-Saw, Warp and Rook. They’re championing daring young film-makers who have also caught the attention of Hollywood and its global distribution and marketing machine. British directors, producers and writers, not just actors, are very hot in Hollywood right now.”

Roberts, who is responsible for overseeing the BFI’s lottery investments in film production, also puts the shift away from romcoms down to a more simple element: money. “I think there is something about the sheer time and expense of writing and testing and tweaking and cutting and testing again that is not always affordable or just too exposing and fraught for an independent film,” he says.

Of course, it’s not just British romcoms that are in trouble. The genre is suffering a downward tailspin that has seen big names from Drew Barrymore to Emily Blunt fail to set the box office alight. The last film in the genre to make more than $100m in the US was 2011’s Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston hit Just Go With It, a film described by the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw as “dispiritingly awful”.

Writer and director Ol Parker, who was behind 2005’s Imagine Me and You, a same-sex spin on the British romantic comedy, thinks it’s a familiarity problem. “The structure and formula are now so well-known that it’s become very hard for the film-maker not to commit the cardinal sin: letting the audience get ahead of the film,” he says. “So it takes some real sparkle – of which I thought Man Up had plenty, especially in the writing – to keep the viewer enjoying a by-now predictable journey.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Renée Zellweger received an Oscar nomination for her role in the 2001 film Bridget Jones’ Diary. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Working Title

Romance films of late have been largely humourless, from this year’s slavery love story Fifty Shades of Grey to the monotonous procession of Nicholas Sparks adaptations that prioritise soft lighting and teary confessions over tickling the funny bone. Last year’s most successful comedies, 22 Jump Street and Bad Neighbours, both placed romance far down their list of priorities, and this summer’s Pitch Perfect and Ted sequels are also far more interested in silliness than swooning.

“These are cynical times,” Parker said. “Some of the romcoms I thought worked best in recent years were 500 Days of Summer, Celeste and Jesse Forever and Like Crazy, all of which reject the standard happy-ever-after formula. We all try to make films in keeping with the times. And the times right now just aren’t that romantic.”

The best recent British romantic comedy wasn’t even a film. Catastrophe, which uses, and refreshes, many familiar genre tropes, was a six-part Channel 4 series, yet it felt like the contemporary update the traditional Working Title formula has been desperately in need of. Given the relatively low profile of the leads Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan, it might have struggled as a theatrical release but strong word-of-mouth made it a minor hit on the small screen (and via Amazon Prime in the US).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest This year’s Man Up, with Simon Pegg and Lake Bell, hasn’t enjoyed anything like the box office success that British romcoms were once guaranteed.

The added running time also allowed Catastrophe to explore its loose Knocked Up-style premise with more depth and messiness, offsetting what can be seen as a shallow and uncomplicated genre with a hint of realism. For now, the small screen might be the safest place for the genre.

“The studios are focusing more than ever on tentpoles based on franchises, superheroes, animation, female comedies, action and horror,” says Kay. “That’s what is working at the box office, so other genres are getting squeezed out a bit. But they’ll come back, and there will always be one-off hits from outlier genres.”

Parker believes it’s just a case of stepping up to the plate. He’s just a writer/director, standing in front of an industry, asking it to try harder, he says. “The solution, as with all things, is to do it better. To find new ways to tell a familiar story. The genre isn’t dead, it just presents a challenge. But if we get it right, people will still want it.”