Always Be My Maybe

Sasha and Marcus grow up next door to each other in San Francisco, sleep together once as teenagers and lose each other. Years later she is a celebrity chef and he is fixing his father's air conditioning units and still playing in the same band. Ali Wong, Randall Park and Michael Golamco wrote it, with Wong and Park starring. The two met at a fried-rice cooking competition in the late nineties and had talked for years about making their own romantic comedy. It is Nahnatchka Khan's first feature. The most discussed sequence is Keanu Reeves playing himself. The team thought it was a long shot and it turned out Reeves was already a fan of Wong's work. By Khan's account he said he would be honoured to be part of this love story, contributed ideas to his scenes and improvised during the game night section. Netflix greenlit it in August 2017 and it was shot in Vancouver and San Francisco in 2018. It arrived on 31 May 2019, and Netflix reported 32 million households in the first four weeks. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 89 percent. Who it is for: viewers who like the romantic comedy shape and are open to dialogue written around Asian American identity. Who it is not for: anyone wanting the genre subverted. The film keeps the template deliberately and changes only what is inside it.