You Lol Some Notes: You’ve Got Mail Reboot Gets Writers, Director
Warner Bros. is developing a You've Got Mail reboot, with Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont writing and Jason Orley directing. A columnist has already offered notes: drop email, rethink the bookshop rivalry, and consider who could play the villain today.
Warner Bros. is developing a reboot of the 1998 romcom You've Got Mail, and the first reactions read like you lol some notes: what to keep, what to bin and who could play the leads today.
The project has a creative team. Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, who wrote the 2010 romcom Leap Year, are writing. Jason Orley is directing.
Orley's credits include the 2022 film I Want You Back and what one columnist called "an inexplicably large number of Pete Davidson vehicles."
A story older than email
The original is almost 28 years old. It follows two rival booksellers who fall in love through email without knowing who the other is.
The premise is itself a remake. You've Got Mail borrowed from Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner, which drew on Miklós László's 1937 Hungarian play Illatszertár. The same mistaken-identity idea runs back through Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), The Rivals (1775) and Much Ado About Nothing (1598).
That history is why the columnist argues only the framing needs updating.
The columnist's notes
The writer backs the reboot, saying of it: "Of course they should try again." Their first note is to drop email, which no longer feels new and now mostly means deleting promotional messages.
Social media could take its place. Two people with anonymized Instagram accounts might fall for each other, or a pair of devoted Substack readers. The columnist also floats Bluetooth or wireless file sharing as a novel route.
The bookshop rivalry needs rethinking too. Being cross with a big bookstore chain in 2026, the columnist writes, is as odd as being cross with Waterstones. Their tongue-in-cheek fix: cast Jeff Bezos as one of the leads.
The casting problem
Casting is harder, the column argues, because generations raised since 1998 distrust technology. A 10-year-old shown an affectionate email from a stranger would assume a scam and delete it unread.
The columnist's workaround is to keep Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, now older, and make a story about two scam-plagued people falling in love. In that version they also hand their money to mysterious Nigerian princes. "Wouldn't you watch this?" the columnist asks.
No release date or cast has been announced.
