Every Version of Anyone But You: a cross-media guide

From Messina to Sydney: a comedy that keeps reinventing itself

Anyone But You (2023) is the most commercially successful adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing in decades, though the film never announces that debt. Director Will Gluck and co-writer Ilana Wolpert transplanted the plot to Sydney: Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and Ben (Glen Powell) have a magical first date, then a humiliating misunderstanding, then are forced together at a destination wedding in Australia where mutual friends conspire to reunite them. Benedick and Beatrice, with new names and a change of clothes.

The source play, written around 1598 and first published in 1600, is Shakespeare at his most romantic and most cynical at once. Beatrice and Benedick are leads who insist they want nothing to do with love while broadcasting every sign that they are already in it. The subplot, borrowed from earlier Italian novella tradition (Bandello, Ariosto), involves the wrongful shaming of Hero, which gives the comedy its one genuinely dark passage. Shakespeare's play has been performed continuously for over four hundred years, and it has attracted film and TV adapters in almost every generation since the medium existed.

Every version of the story

The source play and its major screen, stage and page adaptations

Much Ado About Nothing

Anyone But You

Four centuries of Beatrice and Benedick

c.1598Shakespeare writes Much Ado About Nothing
1600First quarto published
1913Silent film adaptation (UK)
1967BBC TV production with Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith
1984BBC production with Cherie Lunghi and Robert Lindsay
1993Kenneth Branagh's Tuscan-sun adaptation with Emma Thompson
2005BBC ShakespeaRe-Told modern British version
2012Joss Whedon's black-and-white backyard film
2023Anyone But You: Sydney Harbour rom-com

The definitive version is still Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film

Branagh shot at the Villa Vignamaggio with Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, Kate Beckinsale and Keanu Reeves, and the ensemble clicks despite its obvious absurdity as a casting proposition. Thompson's Beatrice is ferociously intelligent and instantly lovable; the film leans into the comedy's warmth without papering over its darker passages. It was a mainstream hit in 1993 and it remains the version most viewers reach for first, with good reason. The Tuscan production design and Patrick Doyle's score have aged beautifully.

Much Ado About Nothing

The underrated one: Joss Whedon's 2012 black-and-white

Shot over twelve days at Whedon's own house with his repertory ensemble, the 2012 Much Ado is scrappier and stranger than the Branagh, but it earns every laugh. Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof bring real history to Beatrice and Benedick. The contemporary Californian setting makes the social cruelties feel genuinely uncomfortable rather than safely historical. It barely got a theatrical release and deserves a much bigger audience.

Much Ado About Nothing