Amazon spent billions only to find its brand on BookTok

The streamer's takeover of YA romance like The Last Sunrise filled a niche, but is in danger of becoming as cynical as any other trend.

By Kayleigh Donaldson | August 26, 2026 | 12:00pm

Photo: Amazon MGM Studios

Film Features Amazon

In The Last Sunrise, the latest romantic drama from Amazon, love comes to Mallorca. Oriah “Ry” Pera (Maria Reficco) is a young dancer who suffers from tuberous sclerosis, a rare genetic condition that causes tumors to grow throughout her body. A recent health scare leaves her torn between increasing her medication dosage, which would put her at risk of permanent memory loss, or surgery, a risky endeavor she may not survive. She opts for the former, then takes a trip to the scenic Balearic Islands with her mother Isolde (Eva Longoria). There, she meets the oh-so-hunky Juliàn (Fernando Lindez), a local fisherman who offers her the perfect summer of love. Ry wants to feel everything, but doing so would mean quitting her pills and putting her life on the line. You may have heard this one before.

Based on a novel by Anna Todd (who got famous from her One Direction fanfic After), The Last Sunrise is a forgettable film that feels like a rip-off of about six different works of this ilk. It’s part Under The Tuscan Sun, part Colleen Hoover melodrama, part calendar shoot full of glistening abs and amber tans. It is faithful to its source material in that every line of dialogue and emotional beat is delivered with the perfunctory quality of a visit to the bank. Everything is shown with such ambivalence, from the performances to the location, which looks like stock footage most of the time, to the barebones story, dragged out to 106 minutes. It looks pretty and so does everyone in it, but there’s no heat, no passion, no stakes. The Last Sunrise is bad, but it is also algorithmically ideal for a niche Amazon has cornered over the past few years: The idyllic young adult romantic drama.

Over the last decade and change, Amazon’s original programming division has spent billions of dollars chasing the highs of Netflix in the Peak TV era. The company tried to capture the late 2010s, early 2020s mood of binge-watches and the high-concept, Hollywood-adjacent series that were once positioned as the future of the medium. It even went so far as to make two of the most expensive TV programs of all time: the truly forgettable spy thriller Citadel (plus its two spin-offs) and The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power, which couldn’t prevent decreased viewership numbers despite a budget of $465 million for a single season. Amazon spent big to find its niche, the thing that the once-populous world of Peak Content could not provide. It finally found it with YA romances.

While Amazon always had romances and rom-coms on its extremely plentiful release schedule—from Something From Tiffany’s to Our Chemical Hearts to My Fake Boyfriend—a change in focus came with Culpa Mía, or My Fault. Based on a novel that began life as a story on Wattpad (the same site that gave us After), the steamy romantic drama delved into the taboo affair between a young woman and her obscenely rich bad-boy stepbrother. Critics lambasted the film, but it was a mega-hit, becoming the most-streamed film on Amazon that year. Culpa Mía, its two sequels, and an English-language remake from 2025 became the foundations of Amazon’s new model. These are simple but glossy offerings, where everyone announces loudly how they’re feeling, the wealth porn only second to the sexiness. Therein lies the heart of Amazon’s romantic equation: BookTok-beloved source material, plus hot people, plus Instagram-ready settings, plus a calculated amount of spice equals a captive streaming audience.

Most of the resulting films are forgettable, and many could easily be confused for one another. Beautiful Disaster, based on a self-published novel, tried to be a saucy rom-com but played like a witless self-parody with gender politics taken straight from the mind of Andrew Tate. My Fault: London is a replicant of the original with a shiny new location. Follow My Voice, another Spanish Wattpad adaptation, has real charm and a sturdier emotional arc but struggles to avoid cliché. They’re all devoted to the blueprint of high-emotion boy-meets-girl drama set against a backdrop of picturesque locales and Spotify-ready soundtracks.

The jewel in Amazon’s crown is The Summer I Turned Pretty, the three-season romantic drama from Jenny Han, based on her own bestselling novels. It’s the platonic ideal of Amazon’s romance strategy, largely because its cliches are curated by people who actually care about getting the story right. It was breezy but had a rock-solid emotional core, with well-defined characters, stories that developed beyond the core love triangle plot, and a coming-of-age rollercoaster of feelings that felt both true to life and aesthetically aspirational. It looked like a dream and sounded like one too, with tons of Taylor Swift songs scoring its peak scenes, making it easily marketable and primed for viral moments. And it worked. By the third and final season, it was Amazon’s most-watched title globally and became the number-one title in more than 140 countries.

Some films break the mold while remaining close to Amazon’s romantic agenda. Red, White & Royal Blue, a rom-com about a prince falling for the son of the President, keeps the fizzy mood of its hetero contemporaries but brings a dash more thematic heft to the proceedings. But make no mistake: Amazon has its formula and it’s keen to reinforce it. It’ll even change a sad ending into a happy one if it needs to, as happened with The Idea Of You, where Anne Hathaway falls for a younger guy in a One Direction-esque boy band. Pairing them up in the end killed the entire point of the book, but it satisfied the streamer’s audience.

There is something to be said for Amazon being so invested in works designed almost exclusively for teen girls and young women, and for its focus to lie so thoroughly in the genre of romance. It wasn’t that long ago that rom-coms were dead in the water and we were begging for their return. Twilight and The Hunger Games created mini-booms in YA cinema, but they and the rip-offs that followed offered diminishing returns. The focus moved towards Marvel-esque IP expansions, and there was no room at the table for two people in love with stakes no higher than emotional satisfaction—so little room that it became a common refrain that romance and sensuality were padding, or a mere reward for the buff superhero once he saved the world. Studios overlooked a real hunger for humanity.

Yet, while Amazon has finally found a rich vein for its streaming platform, it’s almost strip-mined the genre. The Last Sunrise is a sign that this particular Amazon formula is already running on fumes, checking boxes rather than investing in the beating heart that drove its predecessors, trading genre earnestness for cynical calculation.

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