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One Night Only celebrates modern romance on the big screen with a fresh, witty, swoony original film about searching for love on the least romantic night of the year.
One Night Only is directed and produced by Golden Globe nominee Will Gluck, from a script written by Travis Braun (Criminal Minds, T.O.T.S.).
Let’s face it: the modern dating scene is brutal.
It has never been easier to meet people and has never been harder to truly connect. Apps, ghosting and the illusion of endless options have transformed the search for love into something that often feels less like romance and more like a game. That provides a significant challenge for the romantic comedy genre and for romantic films in general.
But if any filmmaker could find a way to reimagine the genre, it is Will Gluck, who has consistently found fresh ways to illuminate modern love on screen, from Anyone but You to Friends with Benefits to Easy A.
The script for One Night Only, written by Travis Braun, is set in an America where single people can have sex only one night each year.
In it, Gluck saw more than a provocative comedic hook and went on to expand the world from there. It opened a new way to explore how people search for intimacy in a world where technology has made everyone more reachable, but not necessarily more available.
“It’s a great jumping off point for a love story,” Will Gluck says. “The film is an allegory for dating and love in our society right now. I wanted to show how we live now: we are very connected with our phones, yet very, very disconnected from people in real life. So, one of my main goals was to show: what if you took what happens on your phone and put it right in front of your face for 12 hours, that same behaviour: swiping, texting, the way we talk to people? How would it affect us? Would we act the same way we do now? Would we act differently? That is what we display and explore in the movie.”
The idea for the story had come to writer Braun at a surprising moment in his life.
“Oddly enough, it came about on my honeymoon,” Braun says. “I was reflecting on the kind of twisting, bumpy road that led me to my lovely wife, and really wanted to capture that feeling in a movie. But I have a short attention span, and writing a movie about years of dating misadventures seemed like it would make for a very long and very boring film, so I decided to see if I could set it all on one night.” In 2024, Braun’s One Night Only script would land the number one spot on the Black List, the annual survey of the best unproduced screenplays of the year. But it did not stay unproduced for long.
The script found an early champion in producer Jacqueline Monetta
Monetta, vice president of Will Gluck’s company, Olive Bridge Entertainment. “I’ve known Travis a long time,” Monetta says. “I remember laughing from the first page. It was so funny, and what a concept. This is an exact metaphor for modern dating. The next day I went into Will’s office and said, ‘I have your next project.’” For Braun, Gluck was the dream filmmaker for this story. “Will was the top name on the director list from the get-go,” Braun says. “I have been a huge fan of his work from Easy A to Friends with Benefits and Anyone but You. Chemistry is everything in romcoms, and no one does it quite like Will.”
Although One Night Only is built around an alternate reality, Gluck never wanted the film to feel futuristic or removed from the world audiences recognise.
“I tried hard to create a world that is not sci-fi,” Gluck says. “It is not dystopian. It feels like today in New York City, except that three years ago a Mandate was passed that outlaws premarital sex. And it feels very real because, the way things are going, this could easily happen. It is like if you never heard anything about COVID or the pandemic, and then you were dropped into our world.”
If the Mandate gave the film its ticking clock, New York City gives the story its scale, spontaneity and romantic possibility. “New York is one of the great cities of the world because everyone from every walk of life is thrown together,” Gluck says. “You are together on the trains, on the streets, walking side by side. That creates the possibility that you could meet someone, that you could fall in love. New York is so alive, so full of people and so full of energy. I had this idea that if you have one night to meet someone, or to decide who you are going to be with, there is no better place.”
That said, the Mandate is not the focus on the story but is merely a catalyst for the characters. “We wanted to make it as simple as possible,” Monetta says. “You had twelve hours, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., as a single person to do whatever you wanted. It all took place over those twelve hours. It was not about what happened three years ago. It was about one night.”
For Gluck, the premise also gave him an innovative way to approach the most persistent challenge in romantic films: how to keep two people apart, authentically, without relying on cliché missed connections or miscommunication.
“A lot of romantic movies, some that I have done, hinge on contrivances,” Gluck says. “If they had only said ‘I didn’t mean this’ or ‘It was a misunderstanding,’ the movie would end after 25 minutes. The Mandate is a way of getting rid of that because this entire twelve-hour event is a contrivance. It is like New Year’s Eve, the idea of, ‘Who are you going to kiss?’ I had to show that we all have a social contract to accept that notion, so we took everyone in America and put them in this 12-hour period of, ‘Who is it going to be?’ But when you peel away all the rules, it just becomes about humans trying to connect and fall in love. At the end of the day, we are all just trying to find a connection with another person. Well, most people are.”
