The First Look at 'Romeo & Juliet' Reimagining 'Rosaline' Puts a New Spin on the Bard
Romeo & Juliet is a formative story for many people. For many readers, it's their first introduction to the work of William Shakespeare and the idea that love doesn't always have a happy ending. (Though, truly, I wish we as a society had managed to take any other lesson from the text beside the idea that dying for love is something we should aspire to, but alas.)
Whether we want to or not, it's a story we all know, whose tragic beats are deeply familiar to us, no matter which onscreen adaptation of the novel happens to be your favorite. (Baz Luhrman's 1996 Romeo + Juliet forever, thank you.) But that familiarity often means finding a way to make a retelling of the Bard's most famous tragedy feel fresh is a loser's game.
This is why the idea of Hulu's upcoming film Rosaline feels like such a breath of fresh air. Loosely based on Rebecca Serle's novel When You Were Mine, the Hulu version has chosen to lean into the original play's period roots rather than embrace the book's more contemporary setting and modern flair. (In it, Juliet basically comes back to town to break up Rosaline and Romeo.)
