It might not be reinventing the wheel as far as this genre goes, but it is honest. Turn the concept of picking someone different (a nobody, boring math teacher) into a conscious choice to ultimately find herself. Get Charlie on-board for a few months to hang out and get to know one another. She wonders if she can spin it into a positive. Whether it was real or not, ignoring it would only make the situation spiral further out of control. Maybe Kat didn’t run off the stage, but she did get married. Except, of course, that 20 million people saw what happened. And if her manager (John Bradley’s Collin) had his way, it would have been. Instead of him going up to her hotel room, she has her driver take him home. And he played along knowing she needed help.

So she looked in the crowd, found Charlie-divorced father of a 12-year-old daughter (Chloe Coleman’s Lou) who was only there because his coworker Parker (Sarah Silverman) had two extra tickets and knew taking them would help make him look “cool” in Lou’s eyes-holding Parker’s “Marry Me” sign, and invited him up to give viewers what they wanted. She needed to do something that wasn’t just running off-stage. Rather this was a woman who thought she found “the one” after three failed marriages only to be proven wrong on the biggest stage possible in the most embarrassing way possible. Unlike the source comic, this wasn’t Kat doing something crazy. (The event was supposed to showcase her nuptials with popstar Bastian-as played by Maluma-before they sing their chart-topping duet then Page Six published footage of him cheating with her assistant seconds before the cue.) My money was on everyone involved missing the psychological turmoil of the situation. So not only has the usual Cinderella rom-com trope of a nobody woman falling for her prince been upended-so too has the notion that these outlandish scenarios must contain an over-zealous desire to “win.” I was ready to roll my eyes and check out the moment Kat and Charlie pull up to her hotel in her limousine shortly after they got married on-stage and streaming in front of 20 million people. Her Kat Valdez is struggling to find love in the midst of fantasy his Charlie Gilbert wasn’t even looking. The switch does wonders for palatability and marketability, charismatic performances from Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson pushing things over the finish line under director Kat Coiro’s stewardship. Screenwriters John Rogers, Tami Sagher, and Harper Dill polish the “don’t all arranged marriages work” sentiment and pee-your-pants excitement comedic edges from the spontaneous and conflict-fueled meet-cute of 20-somethings to the existential crises of two fifty-somethings who, lost in life, are willing to take a leap of faith.

It’s not often a web comic gets optioned into a film produced by a superstar singer for a Hollywood studio, but that’s what happened to Bobby Crosby’s 2012 work Marry Me.

Marry Me by Bobby Crosby