This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.I’m Planning My Wedding as Marital Chaos Takes Over Our Screens—Here’s What I Learned

Erica GonzalesFri, April 3, 2026 at 6:18 PM UTC

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On-Screen Weddings Are More Disastrous Than EverA24/Netflix

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On a recent afternoon, I witnessed a wedding from hell. The bride and groom didn’t finish their vows at the altar; instead, they both stormed out mid-ceremony. The bride went on and on about a family curse that would kill her if she didn’t marry her soulmate. Then, all their wedding guests started to bleed profusely from their eyes, noses, and mouths, dropping dead in pools of blood on the floor.

Luckily, this was all on-screen—in the finale of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, a new Netflix series that turns a young couple’s wedding week into a supernatural horror story. Before the credits rolled, I looked down at my phone and responded to an email, my fiancé sitting beside me on the couch: “Confirmed! See you tomorrow.” We would be touring a wedding venue the next day.

There’s never a “normal” or “chill” time to plan a wedding. But it sure is strange to do it now, as chaotic nuptials seem to be taking over our screens. Something Very Bad, currently the No. 1 TV show on Netflix, arrived just a week before The Drama, A24’s dark-comedy film starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a couple who face a crisis days ahead of their wedding. (Without spoiling too much, he learns a disturbing secret about his fiancée’s past that makes him question whether he still wants to say “I do.”) Both projects feature engaged couples dealing with mounting stress and weddings gone terribly awry, but they also amplify nagging questions of uncertainty: Are you really ready for a lifelong commitment? With this person?

“I had gone to many weddings and heard people say in their vows, ‘I never had a doubt,’ and I just found that so crazy,” Haley Z. Boston, the showrunner of Something Very Bad, tells ELLE. “How could you not have a doubt?” She was inspired by films like Carrie and A Celebration to create a show about her “wrestling with my own doubts of: How do you know if someone’s the right person?”

Of course, weddings have been essential entertainment fodder for generations. These recent projects stand on the shoulders of countless other nuptial films, whether they’re about the stress of planning (Bride Wars, Father of the Bride, The Wedding Planner, A Wedding); difficult personalities and family members (Monster-in-Law, Bridesmaids, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Best Man); getting cold feet (The Hangover, the “Getting Married Today” number in Company); or not knowing what you’ve gotten yourself into (So I Married an Axe Murderer, and that “Don’t ask me about my business” line in The Godfather); the list goes on. Others have also put a genre spin on the theme, like Melancholia, where a wedding takes place as another planet is about to collide with Earth, or Ready or Not, in which a bride’s in-laws try to hunt and kill her on her wedding night. The latter was so popular when it debuted in 2019 that it warranted a sequel, which hit theaters last month.

Weddings “shed light on everything from a couple’s personal taste, to their family dynamics, to the socioeconomic conversations that they’re having,” says Esther Lee, editorial director of The Knot, the popular online wedding planning platform. “Which is why it feels like it's perfect for books, literature, theater.”

The lead-up to the event is also ripe for exploration, because it can say a lot about a relationship’s strength (or lack thereof). “I firmly believe that the engagement is an indicator for success in marriage,” Lee explains. “It's a pressure cooker situation for [couples], in that they're not only planning for this event, but also discovering details about each other [and their] communication styles. Really, when you plan a wedding, you are discovering new things about your partner.”

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama.A24

That’s what happens—to an extreme degree—to groom-to-be Charlie (Pattinson) in The Drama, who begins to fear his fiancée, Emma (Zendaya), after he learns her secret. But he doesn’t want to offend her by admitting he’s scared of her, and he defends Emma when their friends judge her. He also doesn’t want to admit he’s okay with marrying a [redacted]…but he still loves her, doesn’t he? In his rapid spiral, Charlie ends up with a secret of his own, creating an even bigger disaster.

“In your closest relationships, you should be able to share everything, from how you actually feel to who you actually are,” director Kristoffer Borgli said in the press notes for the film. “The Drama is about that idea getting stress-tested between two people who are head over heels in love, and who maybe never considered there could be more to the other person.”

Sure enough, the engagement and wedding planning period “is where communication really does shine within a relationship,” Lee says. In reality, many couples are already having big life conversations before they get engaged, whether it’s about finances, having kids. Even discussions about mental health ahead of marriage are increasingly common.

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The timing of The Drama and Something Very Bad is poignant; they arrive as marriage rates are declining globally. The marriage rate has dropped by 54 percent in the last century, according to a 2022 study, and we’ve reached a record high of unmarried 40-year-olds. A researcher at the Institute for Family Studies told The Atlantic there’s a dip because “many young men are falling behind economically.” (Thus, as many of your single friends using Hinge have probably said, there is sparse “marriage material” on the market.) The culture around marriage is changing altogether. “We’ve finally reached a period in society when getting married is no longer the first pivotal step in becoming an adult, and is instead an active choice that not everyone has to make to survive or thrive,” Allison Raskin, author of I Do (I Think): Conversations About Modern Marriage, recently wrote for Cosmopolitan.

Weddings are also getting increasingly expensive. According to The Knot’s 2026 Real Weddings Study, the average cost per guest has risen to $292 per head; 41 percent of couples went over their budgets last year. Economic anxiety and the pressures of social media are only making couples spend more. Wedding trends data from Zola found that 60 percent of engaged pairs said their biggest planning stressor was trying to make their budgets work with the inspiration they found online.

And then there’s the stress of actually doing all the work. The Knot study says couples spend an average of seven hours a week on wedding planning, and the labor isn’t evenly distributed. One partner is usually handling about 64 percent of tasks, while the other handles 17. (The rest might go to family, the wedding party, or vendors.)

Camila Morrone plays Rachel, a cursed bride, in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.Netflix

This is also a time when Gen Z (41 percent of couples are now of this generation) continues to reject tradition in all realms, including in weddings. Young lovers are ditching archaic customs like the garter toss, a woman changing her last name, or even white bridal gowns, and craving more personalized experiences, according to The Knot.

“You’re being ‘given away’ and it feels, to me at least, like getting trapped, and that’s the scariest thing of all,” Boston says. She even recalls writing in her pitch for Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen: “For someone who’s afraid of commitment, getting married feels like ritual sacrifice.” In a way, these on-screen projects are a violent, disturbing farewell to the long-held expectations of weddings and marriage.

And while these wedding disasters are portrayed to extremes, they’re rooted in very real fears of making a lifelong commitment to someone who’s wrong for you, or might even hurt you. The latter rings true for the recent buzzy divorce memoir, Belle Burden’s Strangers, in which she details her ex-husband having an affair and leaving her and their children in the middle of the pandemic after 20 years of marriage. She was blindsided. Had she chosen the wrong guy? Had she missed all the red flags? Outside of literature, Reesa Teesa’s “Who TF Did I Marry” TikTok series, which went viral in 2020, also captures the fear of not really knowing the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with.

“My mom told me when I was a kid to make sure I don't marry the wrong person,” Boston tells me. “And she says it to me still.” This anecdote reminded me of something my grandmother told me over the phone during Christmas: “You have to be careful,” she said of choosing a husband. She’s about to turn 90 and is losing her memory, but this life lesson remains fresh in her mind.

Weddings have long gone awry on-screen, including in Robert Altman’s 1978 film A Wedding starring Carol Burnett, Mia Farrow, Amy Stryker, and more.Hulton Archive - Getty Images

The challenge of overcoming that doubt—on top of planning an entire wedding—is at the center of Something Very Bad and The Drama. “The opposite of doubt is not certainty; it’s belief,” Boston says. “That’s what any big commitment is: You don’t know how it’s going to work out.” But you take the leap of faith anyway.

While most normal people might be deterred by watching wedding horror stories on-screen ahead of their own wedding, I carried on. (Surely many other brides and grooms are too.) The day after I watched The Drama, I toured another potential wedding venue. As I watched Ready or Not as research for this piece, I entered numbers from a budget proposal into our spreadsheet. I wrote the bulk of this draft after spending a weekend with future in-laws, visiting more venues and discussing who to include (and who to cut) from our guest list. And before I filed this piece, my future husband and I went over emails and estimates from prospective vendors. He promised me that even if we didn’t pick his favorite venue, he “won’t pout about it.” This is us, taking the leap of faith—one checklist item at a time.

Even if my wedding isn’t perfect, it can’t possibly be worse than what I’ve seen on-screen these past few weeks. And if it is, then maybe I’ll write a script about it too.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”