Glen Powell Kills the Fauxmance Playbook After Two Quiet Flops
He credited Sweeney for the whole idea in 2023 ... now two struggling follow-up films later, he says the manufactured buzz is officially retired.
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Glen Powell told Esquire this month he will never again manufacture a celebrity romance or rely on guerrilla marketing to sell a film ... and he is saying it after two consecutive commercial disappointments that arrived without the manufactured heat that made Anyone but You a sleeper hit.
The timing is worth noting. In December 2023 he told Business Insider: "I'll pretty much give Sydney all the credit for this. She's very smart." That was a compliment about Sweeney's instinct to lean into the on-screen chemistry rumors during the film's press tour. It was also a candid admission that the relationship speculation was a deliberate choice, not an accident.
CinemaBlend reported Powell told The New York Times the cast "leaned into their on-screen connection" to sell the rom-com, emphasizing that "fun and chemistry" were necessary elements for selling that genre. The anyone-but-you fauxmance was, by his own description, a marketing campaign that happened to feature real people.
What it cost him personally
What Powell has been slower to discuss is that leaning in was harder for him than for Sweeney. She was in a committed relationship and found the playful on-screen speculation easier to compartmentalize. Powell was simultaneously working through a real breakup from model Gigi Paris, whom he had dated for three years before they split in April 2023.
Paris later said publicly that she was hurt Powell never shut the rumors down. He responded in a September 2025 GQ profile: "I would always have love and respect for Paris." FictionHorizon's synthesis of the timeline makes clear the personal cost was real even as the professional payoff was enormous.
Sweeney has since offered a version of events that contradicts Powell's earlier framing. She told Variety that "the press did the work themselves" and "we were not leaning in." She and Powell have not done a joint interview to reconcile the two accounts.
What the fauxmance was actually worth
Anyone but You opened to about $6 million domestically before becoming one of the most profitable films of 2023: $220 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. The film generated a sustained cycle of earned media coverage, driven largely by speculation about the co-stars, that a $25 million production could not have purchased with a conventional paid media buy.
That is the context for the two films that followed. The Running Man landed in 2025 with no manufactured celebrity angle and hit $69 million worldwide against a $110 million budget. Powell told Esquire where he places the blame: Paramount "let go of an entire marketing department a month before our movie came out in the middle of a merger." The studio, not the star, took the heat for that one.
How to Make a Killing (2026) sits at 45 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Powell's own read on that one: "There just was not enough time to do it properly. There's no rush." Neither film had anything close to the fauxmance machine.
The uncomfortable math
Powell's declaration skips the most obvious data point in the story. The fauxmance was the part that worked. Anyone but You succeeded because it gave entertainment press something to write about that had nothing to do with the plot ... the film beat the review cycle entirely because the stars were the story.
Without that, Powell is competing on content and conventional marketing. Content has been mixed. Marketing, at least on The Running Man, fell apart before the film arrived. Retiring guerrilla tactics is a principled choice with a real professional cost attached.
The irony is that Sweeney, who Powell credits as the architect of the whole strategy, is currently at the center of a marketing cycle that her Novig ad campaign generated entirely on its own. Her approach to polarizing publicity has not changed. His has.
Neither Powell's camp nor Sweeney's camp had comment on today's reporting.
Watch for whether Powell's next project gets a conventional campaign or whether the no-fauxmance rule quietly bends when a studio needs a hit.
Sources & further reading
- CinemaBlend: Glen Powell Learned Hard Lessons After Anyone But You Fauxmance With Sydney Sweeney And Movie Flops (Oct 7, 2026)
- Yahoo Entertainment: Glen Powell Learned Hard Lessons After Anyone But You Fauxmance With Sydney Sweeney And Movie Flops (Oct 7, 2026)
- Fox News Entertainment: Glen Powell credits Sydney Sweeney idea to lean into dating rumors during press tour (Dec 2023)
- FictionHorizon: Glen Powell Swears off Fake Romance Marketing After the Anyone but You Sydney Sweeney Saga (Oct 7, 2026)
- Wikipedia: Anyone but You (box office data)
