The Wedding Banquet (1993) took one of the most common romcom tropes — the sham marriage — to its saddest and most realistic conclusion. While still keeping plenty of humor born from farcical misunderstanding, Ang Lee’s film about a gay Chinese American man who pretends to marry a woman was heavy with queer loneliness, familial disappointment, and the cruelty of the American immigration system. True to its genre, the film does reach a hopeful conclusion, but it’s one that remains grounded, an optimism that doesn’t ignore the frequent limitations of life.

It’s been 32 years and in that time the experience of being queer has changed dramatically. Even as conservative backlash leads to anti-trans sentiments in the US and many other parts of the world, there’s no denying that being gay in 2025 is a very different experience than it was in the early 90s.

Andrew Ahn’s new take on The Wedding Banquet — co-written with original co-writer James Schamus — works, because it once again approaches its heightened romcom premise through a grounded reality. That reality has changed in the passing decades and instead of fighting against it, Ahn and Schamus embrace those changes as narrative opportunities. If the original film was about the shame of being gay, this film is about the lingering effects years after the shame subsides.

The Wedding Banquet (2025) is about codependent college besties Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Chris (Bowen Yang), both gay, both with complicated relationships toward their theoretically supportive Chinese American families. Angela’s mom (Joan Chen) has gone from dismissive of her queerness to being a literally award-winning ally. Angela’s partner Lee (Lily Gladstone) is on her second round of IVF and Angela’s mom is being super normal about it. (She’s not.) Meanwhile, Chris’ wealthy Korean American artist boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan) has been informed by his grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) that if he doesn’t want to get cut off — and lose his American visa — he needs to join the corporate family business.

Instead, Min decides to propose to Chris to stay in the U.S., but commitmentphobic Chris can’t handle the pressure of being the reason Min loses his homophobic family’s riches. That’s when Min and Lee come up with a scheme: What if Min married Angela and in exchange Min paid for Lee and Angela’s IVF? Already absurd, this idea grows even more unwieldy when Min’s grandmother decides to visit for the wedding to meet her new granddaughter-in-law.

Both films feature scenes where the main characters de-gay their homes before the arrival of family — in this film Chris and Min live in Lee and Angela’s backhouse — but now that task is even more impossible. It’s 2025 and just about everything in Lee and Angela’s home is gay. Again, this is used instead of ignored. It’s used for humor and it’s used for plot mechanics like when Lee explains she can’t be the one to marry Min because her job is being gay. (She works with queer youth, while Angela works with plastic-eating worms.)

Andrew Ahn’s Fire Island embraced the comedy and grand gestures of the romcom genre and this film does as well. Despite its commitment to the realities of queer Asian American experience, immigrant experience, and lesbian motherhood experience, it’s less the indie dramedy of the original and more the rare gift of a big queer comedy. Within this framework, I can see people feeling like the dramatic moments are too expositional or overt, but for me it just felt like a very true portrayal of queer processing. Gay people talk!! And, in fact, a major thread throughout the film is Lee and Min pushing Angela and Chris to talk more instead of running away from tough conversations.

These dramatic moments also work due to a quartet of truly remarkable performances. Kelly Marie Tran, Lily Gladstone, Joan Chen, and Youn Yu-jung are all doing such lovely work, the kind of wonderful dramatic acting that hasn’t regularly appeared in this kind of comedy in decades. If Bowen Yang and Han Gi-Chan don’t quite match these dramatic heights, they make up for it with the comedy. And Bobo Le adds a fun burst of young queer energy as Chris’ cousin Kendall.

Supportive family is another queer experience that doesn’t fit neatly into a binary. It’s refreshing to receive a queer film about chosen family and biological family that lives in these complexities. There are still challenges after acceptance has been achieved. There are also opportunities. The Wedding Banquet is about those opportunities.

The Wedding Banquet opens in theatres this Friday.

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