Money matters to the characters played by Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in Materialists. Photo / A24
By making the number explicit, Celine Song’s new film reflects modern dating realities in a way rom-coms rarely have before.
Almost everyone who sees Materialists, writer-director Celine Song’s new spin on the old romantic comedy formula, seems to want to talk about one number: US$80,000 ($132,000). That’s how much Lucy (Dakota Johnson) says she makes in her job as a matchmaker. She brings it up to goad Harry (Pedro Pascal) into revealing his own salary, but he will only say that he makes “more” – which, as a finance guy working in private equity and owner of a US$12 million bachelor pad, he certainly does.
The viewer conversations are over whether Lucy’s salary is realistic for her lifestyle: she wears relatively nice clothing and lives alone in what appears to be a peaceful and brightly lit apartment, though we don’t see much of the interior. The film’s production designer revealed in an interview that Lucy’s home is a teeny-tiny studio on the edge of the affluent Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood, with a rent that she probably shouldn’t be paying relative to her salary. Yet this matches her character’s single-minded aspiration: to be surrounded by wealth.
We could debate whether the rest of her lifestyle, like her clothing, is realistic on her salary; I tend to think it could be, but in a Carrie Bradshaw, leveraged-to-the-hilt way. After all, we live in a world where direct-to-consumer brands sell decent silk slip dresses, and everyone’s thrifting or renting outfits – not to mention that anything looks good on Johnson.
But the fact we’re even debating that specific number is remarkable, and hints at what makes Materialists feel so very 2025. At my screening, the salary detail provoked a collective gasp that briefly sucked the air out of the room. It wasn’t even the amount, really; it was the fact that someone had said a number at all.
Nobody talks salary in rom-coms – or really in movies at all. That’s probably in part to avoid dating a film too much. But it’s also because concrete numbers are startling, even distracting. Suddenly you’re tabulating Lucy’s lifestyle, trying to conjure up a mental balance sheet. And for Materialists, money is in every frame, in a way we’ve rarely seen in the modern romantic comedy. It says something interesting about our cultural moment.
The last Hollywood heyday for rom-coms was the 1990s, when the genre was so popular that big stars were happy to take part. Money comes up once in a while in those films. In You’ve Got Mail, Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) has a little, but Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) has a lot. In Notting Hill, William Thacker (Hugh Grant) has a little, but Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) has a lot. In Pretty Woman, Vivian Ward (Roberts) has a little, but Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) has a lot.
Yet money itself is not the point. These movies are about contemporary social classes and how they collide (corporate bookstore guy and indie bookstore girl, A-list star and bookstore guy, corporate guy and escort). The different income levels take a back seat to different social circles and lifestyle trappings. The friction produced by those mismatches generates love – which, as we know, conquers all.
In most rom-coms of that era, we barely know how much anyone makes. The popular careers in the genre – aside from, apparently, bookstore owner – usually have to do with magazines or newspapers, or sometimes the entertainment industry. Today you have to climb several rungs of the ladder to make good money in those fields, but in the 1990s you might have been able to get by; even so, the characters’ apartments and fancy nights out and handbag brands seem fiscally improbable. Yet we don’t have definite numbers, so it’s okay, because it’s all part of the fantasy.
During that era on the small screen, this dynamic repeated itself in Friends, which managed to stretch out Ross and Rachel’s standard rom-com arc for 10 seasons. Characters talk about money quite a bit in Friends, with some episodes built around the salary disparity within the group. Yet their wardrobes and apartments seemed unnaturally nice, especially Monica’s spacious West Village place in Manhattan, with its huge windows and balcony. (Eventually the show explained that Monica was illegally finagling rent control.) Once again, you could ignore all that because you didn’t know the exact numbers, just that some of the friends made more than others.
Crucially, whether on TV or film, these salary disparities were almost never in the foreground of the story. You might be worried that the leads wouldn’t get together, even though of course you knew they would. But they’d never be kept apart because of income levels. There was little serious social stigma involved financially.
The no-numbers policy of the 1990s rom-com diverges sharply from the practices of the grandmother of the rom-com – that is, Jane Austen. In her books (and the movies based on them), characters frequently know one another’s precise income: Mr Darcy gets £10,000 a year, a handsome sum, while Elizabeth Bennet will get only £40 annually after her father dies. Despite his love affair with Marianne Dashwood, Willoughby, whose income is a mere £600 or so per year, marries Miss Grey to increase his salary to £3000. Wealthy Emma Woodhouse manipulates the love life of Harriet Smith, who has no money to speak of, in order to increase her station – but middle-class Mr Elton won’t even look at Harriet, instead marrying a woman who brings £10,000 to the union.
Different era and different society, of course. But it’s hard to imagine any of that flying in the 20th-century version of the same genre, even in the more class-obsessed British settings. (Though wealth comes up in the abstract in Bridget Jones’s Diary, based loosely on Pride and Prejudice, we never know Mark Darcy’s actual salary.)
The real numbers have a way of bursting the fantasy. Song has said that although she embraces the escapism inherent in the genre, she included the concrete figure quite deliberately, prodding audiences to talk about money openly even if culturally it’s still considered impolite.
“Let’s be realistic about that: It’s not polite to people who don’t want you to know how much money they have,” she told The New York Times.
That’s in keeping with the larger idea behind Materialists, which probes a post-’90s dynamic in dating: the commodification of people on dating apps, just another place to find made-to-order goods. The matchmaking service that Lucy provides does much the same thing, filtering out and matching candidates by numbers on a spreadsheet: age, weight, height, income. Characters constantly talk about feeling valuable, which here is not at all metaphorical. They’re literally ascribing to themselves and one another a valuation in a crowded marketplace.
I was struck by how simultaneously old and new that felt. Old, because it’s Jane Austen all over again: prospective love interests know their date’s income ahead of time and use that as a basis to decide whether it’s a suitable match, before sparks even get a chance to fly.
We, as observers of the prospective relationship, know that information too, and are making our own decisions. It takes a bit of the gloss off the romance, knowing that some characters consider specific numbers to be significant barriers to the match. Even when love conquers all, there’s something sobering about it, a realism that feels distinctly old-fashioned.
But it’s new, too. Unless you work in a few chosen fields, it’s become harder to get by since the 1990s, especially in the urban areas where rom-coms are often set. On screen and off, many people seem to have some kind of safety net, parents or side gigs or something more mysterious. Furthermore, by the time you’re in your mid-30s, as Lucy and others in the film are, it’s harder to suddenly switch careers. So unless you’re already on that path, there’s a very small chance you’ll suddenly become wildly wealthy – and the quickest, most accessible route to an enhanced net worth is to marry someone rich.
Most people are aware of this, whether they admit it or not. We live in a world where young women talk openly on social media platforms about how to get men to send you money, how to find a sugar daddy, activities with a veneer of romance that both parties know are actually centred on money. But even for women who are determined to earn their own money, there’s little shyness left.
Breaking down salaries and living expenses makes for popular internet content. Millennial and Gen Z influencers, many of them women, make videos about investing, about how much you should have in the bank, about what sort of high-yield savings accounts and exchange-traded funds give you the most bang for your hard-earned buck. The goal is often explicitly getting to financial freedom as fast as possible, which isn’t about buying whatever you want. These influencers talk about being able to choose your own path or leave your job with your sexist, lecherous boss, never having to depend on a man.
So it’s both bracing and thoroughly of-the-moment for a movie to name salary numbers. It erases some of the fantasy of the romance but grounds the characters in our reality a lot more. Depending on who you are, it may make you identify with the protagonist, but in either case a little of the illusion is gone. In its place is a realism about the world in which we live, and what some people – maybe us – really want.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alissa Wilkinson
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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