General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20264 min read

Definitely, Maybe

Definitely, Maybe is a 2008 romantic comedy written and directed by Adam Brooks, in which a divorced father tells his young daughter the story of his past relationships, changing the women's names so she must guess which one became her mother. It stars Ryan Reynolds, Isla Fisher, Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Banks, Abigail Breslin, Derek Luke, and Kevin Kline, and was produced by Working Title Films for Universal Pictures.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	February 8, 2008 (United Kingdom); February 14, 2008 (wide, United States)³
Runtime and rating	111 minutes; PG-13 for sexual content, including some frank dialogue, language and smoking³
Director and writer	Adam Brooks¹
Principal cast	Ryan Reynolds (Will Hayes), Isla Fisher (April), Elizabeth Banks (Emily), Rachel Weisz (Summer), Abigail Breslin (Maya), Derek Luke, Kevin Kline¹^•²
Box office	$32,241,649 domestic, $55,617,866 worldwide, against a $7,000,000 production budget³
Critical scores	71% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (147 reviews); Metascore 59 from 33 reviews on Metacritic⁴^•⁵
Key crew	Cinematographer Florian Ballhaus, editor Peter Teschner, composer Clint Mansell, production designer Stephanie Carroll¹

Spoilers

Plot and structure

Will Hayes, a thirtysomething Manhattan advertising executive, is in the middle of divorce proceedings when his young daughter Maya asks how he met and fell in love with her mother. He flashes back to 1992, when he left his college sweetheart Emily in Wisconsin to work on the Bill Clinton presidential campaign in New York, and recounts his romances with three women: Emily, the wisecracking copy-shop worker April, and Summer, a brainy writer and friend of Emily's. He changes their names so that Maya must guess which one became her wife and mother.⁴^•⁶

The frame story turns the romance into a romantic whodunnit: the audience pieces out the answer alongside Maya as Will's story unfolds. The film runs the political thread in parallel, following Will from campaign gofer to disillusioned Clinton supporter to head of a political consultancy and finally advertising executive, against a background of 1990s news events including the Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky stories.⁶^•⁷ A recurring plot detail is a 1943 edition of Jane Eyre, which carries emotional weight in Will's relationship with April.⁸

Production

The film came from Working Title Films, the British production company behind Notting Hill and Love Actually, with Ringerike Erste Filmproduktion and Universal Pictures; Universal handled distribution.²^•⁹ Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner produced, and the production budget was $7,000,000.¹^•³

Brooks, whose earlier screenplays included French Kiss and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, took on directing as well as writing here. In interviews he described the film as "a personal story that I wanted to tell," a "love letter to broken homes," and an attempt to write the "anti-romantic comedy."

Release and box office

Universal opened the film in the United Kingdom on February 8, 2008, and widely in the United States on February 14, Valentine's Day, in 2,204 theaters. The opening weekend grossed $9,764,270, about 30.3 percent of the eventual domestic total, and the film ran for an average of 4.3 weeks per theater. Domestic receipts reached $32,241,649 and international receipts $23,376,217, for a worldwide total of $55,617,866, 7.9 times the production budget. Box Office Mojo lists the worldwide figure slightly higher, at $55,990,299. Estimated domestic DVD sales added $13,997,471, with the video release on June 24, 2008 by Universal Home Entertainment.³^•¹⁰

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 71 percent Tomatometer from 147 reviews and a 72 percent audience score from more than 100,000 ratings; the critics consensus calls it "a refreshing entry into the romantic comedy genre." Metacritic recorded a metascore of 59 from 33 reviews.⁴^•⁵

Reviewers singled out the cast and the structure. David Denby of The New Yorker wrote that the film "has charm and spirit," and Variety's Dennis Harvey called it "a pleasingly non-formulaic romantic seriocomedy" with "charm and some depth." The Philadelphia Inquirer's Steven Rea praised its "emotional depth and intelligence" and Isla Fisher's performance; the Christian Science Monitor was cooler, calling it "a romance posing as a detective story in which the solution is obvious."⁵^•⁶^•¹¹ The Guardian's Philip French judged it "moderately entertaining in a sub-Woody Allen way," and Time Out gave it three of five stars, finding Reynolds outclassed by his leading women.⁷^•¹²

Comparison with How I Met Your Mother

Viewers have noted the similarity between the film's premise and the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, in which a father likewise narrates his romantic past to his children. The timing rules out influence in either direction: the film was released in 2008, three years after the show debuted on CBS. Brooks said the film was a personal story rather than a response to the series.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2007 to 2008 › Released in 2008

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?