PWMOV Review: A Beloved Story Dulled By its PG-13 Adaptation

Last month, Netflix released the highly anticipated movie adaptation of the romance novel People We Meet on Vacation— the first of many upcoming adapted projects from beloved author Emily Henry. This release follows a recent pattern of adaptations of this genre of book: not just romance novels, but particularly smutty romance novels hidden behind their seemingly innocent cartoon character cover art. You’ve seen them en masse at the front-and-center Barnes and Noble display, on BookTok, your sister’s bedside table— these things are everywhere. Due to the explicit nature of these novels, they are difficult to adapt and often miss the mark. People We Meet on Vacation is no exception. 

The story follows Poppy (My Lady Jane’s Emily Bader) and Alex (The Ballad of Songbird and Snake’s Tom Blyth) as they form an unlikely friendship after a long road trip from college to their shared hometown. They start the trip off as strangers, but quickly get a read on each other. Poppy is a plucky, loud, outgoing dreamer with a case of wanderlust so strong that she ends up vacationing for a living as a travel writer after college. Alex is a Type A, cranky pragmatist who plans on settling down with his high school sweetheart and would be content to stay in the same spot forever. Though they kick the trip off annoyed with each other, the intimacy of a night in a trashy motel builds the foundation of a friendship, which eventually leads to the promise to vacation together every summer no matter what. The film flashes back and forth from present day, where the two are no longer on speaking terms but are both attending Alex’s brother’s wedding (modern day heterosexual romcoms always feature a gay wedding à la Anyone But You…it must be a clause in the studio contracts or something), and the vacations they took every summer leading up to their fracture. 

Ever since the movie was announced in 2022, the online chatter has been fervent on everything from casting, to the tiniest details in the book that fans felt strongly should be included— exactly as written, of course. As someone who made my way to many midnight premieres in my childhood (back when these were still culturally relevant events) for movie adaptations of the books I cherished, I understand the pressure on an adaptation of this magnitude. Not only have individuals formed their own connections to the characters and their journey independently, but the novel has sold over 2 million copies in the U.S. alone, meaning there are thousands of reddit threads, comment sections, Facebook groups, and more full of fans bonding over the book and sharing expectations for the movie. 

Some of the most anticipated scenes in these genre adaptations are, of course, the sex scenes. However, this tends to be where they fall flat. These books are largely built off of clichés you’ve seen hundreds of times: enemies to lovers, friends-to-lovers, love triangles. People We Meet on Vacation is definitely a friends-to-lovers, but it’s also the classic golden retriever/black cat dynamic. Poppy being the former and Alex, the latter. These clichés often lead a story to the fate of being a cheese-fest, which isn’t always a bad thing…cheesy can be fun! But that doesn’t need to be the default. PWMOV does not defy this fate. At times it is so cheesy it’s almost unbearable, largely due to the fact that Poppy, the golden retriever, is minimized into a caricature—becoming more like the illustration on the cover of the book than the real person that comes across on the pages within. A comparable adaptation is the 2023 film Red, White & Royal Blue, another direct-to-streaming romcom that originated as a cartoon-cover book that falls into the same trap. Its golden retriever Alex, played by Taylor Zakhar Perez, speaks as if he’s visiting Earth for the first time and only had access to 80s sitcoms and a TikTok For You Page from 2020 to learn how to speak like a human being. 

There’s an infantilizing quality in the films to both Poppy and Red, White & Royal Blue’s Alex that cuts the sex scenes off at the knees a bit. In a 2026 interview with Variety ahead of the movie’s release, author Emily Henry prepared viewers that the sex scene that made it into the cut is nothing compared to the steamy, intimate one they originally shot. Henry explained that after test screenings, audiences felt that the explicit scene was a “hard right turn in the movie” and the director ultimately decided to cut it to “serve the larger movie.” It makes sense that an HBO-level sex scene would throw people off, considering the protagonist talks like a Disney character for the first ninety minutes. But is the answer to this imbalance to mitigate the sex, or return to the original text and add back the layers and realism into the characters? Hell, maybe even up the sex! These are grown adults – the fact that there’s a scene where they’re both single, sharing a tent, one-inch from each other in the midst of an intimate conversation and this bold, fearless woman who tried to hook up with their boat driver she just met doesn’t decide to make a move on Alex here is perplexing. 

Another recent adaptation in this category that rose to the top and infected the minds of everyone that clocks into popular culture is Heated Rivalry, the romance series featuring closeted rival hockey players who fall in love. The clichés are built-in here, too, but it manages to leave the humanity and depth of the characters intact, perhaps because it treats its adult characters like adults. Granted, the show had eight hours to develop instead of two, but it also did not shy away from sex. And audiences swooned all the more for it—proving that what needs to be abolished in these adaptations is the childlike depiction of the golden retrievers, rather than the intimacy that makes the books so beloved.

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