In film and television, a meet cute is a scene in which the two people who will form a future romantic couple meet for the first time, typically under unusual, humorous, or "cute" circumstances. This type of scene is a staple of romantic comedies. Frequently, the meet-cute leads to a humorous clash of personality or of beliefs, embarrassing situations, or comical misunderstandings that further drive the plot.
Etymology
The origin of the term is unknown but it appears to have been familiarly associated with Hollywood screenwriting by at least 1941. The earliest example given by the Oxford English Dictionary is from Anthony Boucher's mystery novelThe Case of the Solid Key, in which a character says "We met cute, as they say in story conferences". As this example implies, the term was already well-known, and in a 1996 The Paris Review interview, screenwriter Billy Wilder, referring to his 1938screwball comedy filmBluebeard's Eighth Wife says that the concept was "a staple of romantic comedies back then". In George Axelrod's play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a character explains, Several subsequent examples can be found of reviewers using the term. Bosley Crowther, in his February 1964 review of Sunday in New York, writes that a character "is conveniently importuned by this attractive young fellow she happens to run into—to "meet cute," as they say—on a Fifth Avenue bus". Film critics such as Roger Ebert or the Associated Press' Christy Lemire popularized the term in their reviews. In Ebert's commentary for the DVD of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which he co-wrote, he describes the scene where law student Emerson Thorne bumps into the female character Petronella Danforth. Ebert admits that he, as the screenwriter, wrote into the script a "classic Hollywood meet cute". He explains the meet cute as a scene "in which somebody runs into somebody else, and then something falls, and the two people began to talk, and their eyes meet and they realize that they are attracted to one another".
