8 Best Romance Movies With the Grumpy Sunshine Trope, Ranked

Image via 20th Century Studios Published Oct 12, 2026, 6:32 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. Sign in to your Collider account There's something undeniably satisfying about watching a guarded, emotionally unavailable character fall for someone who brings a little sunshine into their world—whether through relentless optimism, playful teasing, or simply refusing to be intimidated by a bad attitude. Of course, the grumpy x sunshine trope thrives on that contrast as it turns clashes into witty banter, unexpected tenderness, and the kind of romantic tension that keeps us rooting for two to get together. Thankfully, the recent release of The Love Hypothesis has scratched that itch. But Hollywood has given us plenty of stories with prickly love interests and bright-eyed romantics. So, just in case you're in the mood for some electrifying chemistry or simply want more proof that opposites really do attract, here are the best films with the best contrasting dynamics. 8 'Leap Year' (2010) Image via Universal Pictures After her four-year anniversary passes without a proposal, Anna Brady (Amy Adams) sees an opportunity when she learns of an Irish tradition where women propose to men on February 29. Hoping to surprise her boyfriend while he's in Dublin, her plans are sadly derailed when a storm hits. Now, stuck on the other side of the country, Anna seeks the help of pub owner Declan O'Callaghan (Matthew Goode)—even as they clash over almost everything. Anna and Declan's chemistry easily stems from the fact that neither is particularly impressed by the other's approach to life. Anna is determined to follow the romantic plan she's mapped out for herself, while Declan's dry humor and cynical outlook make him a decidedly unenthusiastic companion. Thankfully, their disastrous journey across Ireland gradually challenges their worldview: Declan proves that romance doesn't always arrive in the neat, carefully planned package you'd expect, while Anna showcases the beauty in opening oneself to the vulnerabilities love. It's a classic opposites-attract story that lets its leads bicker their way into falling for each other. 7 '10 Things I Hate About You' (1999) Image via Buena Vista Pictures Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) is an outspoken high-school senior who has no interest in dating. Unfortunately, her father has a rule that Kat's younger sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) cannot date unless Kat does too, leaving Bianca's romantic prospects dependent on finding someone willing to take on her intimidating sister. Enter Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), an arranged suitor that's secretly paid to date Kat. In 10 Things I Hate About You, Kat isn't waiting around for someone to sweep her off her feet, and she certainly isn't interested in making herself more agreeable to fit in. That's what makes Patrick's attempts to win her over so entertaining: beneath his laid-back troublemaker persona, he's intrigued by a girl who refuses to play by everyone else's rules. The result? An essential romance that has a rebellious streak, with its sharp banter and unexpected moments of pure tenderness (even amid the terrifying stakes of it all). 6 'The Proposal' (2009) Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Desperate to keep her job and avoid being deported back to Canada, demanding book editor Margaret Tate (Sandra Bullock) hastily announces that she's engaged to her long-suffering assistant, Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds)—a man who only agrees to ruse in exhange for a promotion. But when the two are forced to travel to Andrew's family home in Alaska, their carefully constructed lie becomes harder to maintain. Margaret is used to being the most intimidating person in any room, so watching her lose control of her carefully managed image is half the fun of The Proposal. In Alaska, Andrew sees her outside the office, where her intimidating persona gives way to glimpses of vulnerability and loneliness. On the other hand, Marget gets a taste of the warmth and family connection that Andrew has taken for granted. In the end, their romance works because their fake engagement forces them to truly let their guards down—even if neither is particularly keen to admit it. 5 'Bridget Jones's Diary' (2001) Image via Miramax Films Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) is a single Londoner who decides to turn her life around while documenting her romantic disasters in a diary. She initially falls for her charming but unreliable boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), while repeatedly crossing paths with Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), a reserved barrister she considers arrogant and judgmental. Sure, Bridget isn't exactly sunshine in the relentlessly cheerful sense. She's anxious, self-deprecating, and prone to spectacular misjudgments. But her messy, open-hearted approach to life makes a perfect foil for Mark's stiff reserve. This is what makes their early encounters so painfully awkward and hilarious. When together, audiences discover that Mark's cool exterior conceals a genuinely caring man, and that Bridget doesn't need to become more sophisticated to be loved. Instead, Bridget Jones's Diary reminds us that the person who seems least compatible with you on paper might just be the one who sees you most clearly (just the way you are). 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 & SallyYou 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 & BasketballYou 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 RivalryThe 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. TitanicYou 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 'When Harry Met Sally' (1989) Image via Columbia Pictures When Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) first meet on a long drive from Chicago to New York, they immediately disagree about whether men and women can ever be platonic friends. Years later, they reconnect as single adults and eventually become close friends, sharing their dating disasters and relationship problems, even as their feelings for each other grow increasingly complicated. Harry approaches romance with cynical certainty, while Sally's optimism comes with a formidable list of preferences and opinions of her own. That makes their dynamic a slightly more mature take on grumpy x sunshine, with neither character simply existing to soften the other. Instead, their differences create the conversations, arguments, and mutual fascination that gradually turn friendship into love. That's the real timeless trick behind When Harry Met Sally, as they make two people who seem fundamentally incompatible feel like the most natural couple imaginable once they finally stop fighting their feelings. 3 'Enchanted' (2007) Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Right as she's set to marry the prince of her dreams, the impossibly cheerful Giselle (Amy Adams) is suddenly banished from the animated kingdom of Andalasia to modern-day New York, thanks to the schemes of an evil queen. Upon her arrival, she meets Robert (Patrick Dempsey), a cynical divorce lawyer who initially has little patience for Giselle's fairy-tale worldview. But just as she adjusts to her new surroundings, the two not only begin to change their outlook on life, but also their feelings towards each other. Giselle's relentless belief in fairytale romance is hilariously out of place in New York, where Robert has grown accustomed to treating love as something that rarely survives contact with reality. Of course, their contrasting attitudes give the film much of its charm, but Enchanted doesn't simply reward Giselle for her sweet sincerity nor portrays Robert as someone who needs fixing. Living in the real world forces her to reconsider what happily-ever-after actually means, while Robert discovers that protecting himself from disappointment can also mean missing out on real love. It's a perfect family fairytale that allows its characters to grow and earn their happy ending. 2 'Pride & Prejudice' (2005) Image via Focus Features When the spirited Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) meets the wealthy Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), first impressions don't go quite as well as one would hope. But as misunderstandings, family scandals, and romantic complications pull them repeatedly into each other's orbit, the two are forced to confront their growing feelings—even as their own arrogance stands in the way. Few romances have perfected the dynamic quite like Elizabeth and Darcy—even though Elizabeth might be better described as spirited rather than relentlessly sunny. Darcy's stiffness and reserve clash beautifully with Elizabeth's wit and confidence to challenge him, making their arguments almost as entertaining as their romantic moments. As such, the real appeal lies in how neither changes to accommodate the other. Darcy learns to look beyond his ego and social expectations, while Elizabeth recognizes the flaws in her short-sightedness. It's one of the most iconic love stories that proves how love and understanding only come from self growth. 1 'The Sound of Music' (1965) Image via 20th Century Studios In 1930s Austria, the free-spirited Maria (Julie Andrews) leaves her convent to become the governess to the seven children of widowed naval Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer). But upon her arrival, she quickly discovers that the house is run with strict military discipline and not a lot of warmth. This changes as Maria brings music and fun back into their lives, connecting not only with the children, but with the supposed cold-hearted Captain himself. Maria and Captain von Trapp are one of the best contrasting couples simply because their differences are built directly into the story. He has become cold and emotionally shut down after the loss of his wife, while Maria approaches life with curiosity, affection, and a complete lack of convention. Interestingly, her influence doesn't magically turn the Captain into a different person. Instead, she reminds him of the warmth and joy he had simply lost. Meanwhile, he is the one that gives Maria the stability and familial fulfillment she never quite found at the convent. In the end, their epic romance is about two very different people bringing out the best in each other, and that's all one wants.