Overview

• Materialists, Celine Song’s second feature after Past Lives, opened in theaters on June 13 starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans in a New York-set love triangle.
• Critics are divided on the film’s tone: many applaud its mature deconstruction of romantic comedy conventions while others critique its genre-blurring approach.
• The story draws on Song’s six-month experience as a matchmaker and satirizes clients’ obsession with height, income and age in modern dating.
• A subplot underscores the real-world risks of transactional courtship by portraying the consequences of reducing people to checkboxes.
• Produced by A24, Materialists is expected to be available on premium video on demand roughly a month after release, with HBO Max streaming anticipated about four months later.