Nearly three years ago, rom-com aficionado Will Gluck struck gold with his sizzling spin on Shakespeare, Anyone but You. Carried by the chemistry of its magnetic stars, Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, it became an unexpected global phenomenon, earning $220 million globally and becoming the highest-grossing live-action adaptation of The Bard’s work ever to hit theaters. Now, the writer-director is looking to see if lightning can strike twice with an even wilder premise that invokes The Purge. Ahead of its arrival in August, we’re excited to feature One Night Only as part of Collider’s Exclusive Summer Preview series, and we can share a new image highlighting the central romance between Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro on the steamiest night of the year.
Our exclusive still shows the A Complete Unknown and Masters of the Air stars opposite each other in apparently matching vehicles, leaning out of their respective windows for a cute little moment as Barbaro reaches out her hand. From the looks on their faces, their chance encounter has sparked something special that viewers will get to see unfold across one chaotic evening in a slightly fictionalized New York. The duo plays Allie and Owen, love-starved strangers who are looking for something more. One is a hopeful romantic, and the other is still recovering from a break-up, yet despite the clear connection between them, everything seems to keep getting in their way. It’s fitting that they’re in separate cars, signaling how, despite being so close in the bustling city, they remain so far from each other.
The rub of One Night Only is that it takes place in a world where single people are only legally allowed one night a year to hook up with one another. That leaves Allie and Owen as outliers at a time when everyone in the city is scrambling to take advantage of the opportunity. Amid the hustle and bustle, however, one misstep and detour after another conspires to keep them separated, pulling them towards and away from each other throughout the evening. Yet, in their attempts to link up, they may discover that exactly what they’ve been looking for has been much closer than they could’ve imagined when they take a moment to reflect.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Who Else Is Coming Out for ‘One Night Only’?
The chemistry between Turner and Barbaro will be what makes the magic for One Night Only, but the cast is also stacked with talent. Joining them in the high-concept rom-com are Maya Hawke, Julia Fox, King Princess, Ben Marshall, Ziwe, Molly Ringwald, Nicholas Braun, and LeVar Burton. Gluck penned his script based on an original screenplay by Travis Braun, whose original work topped the 2024 Black List. In an interview with Collider’s Michael Zimmerman, the two leads attested to how Gluck, with his wealth of experience in the genre, helped elevate the project to new heights. Turner recalled how the writer-director spurred the actors to get creative and experiment, making something both more organic and freeing to be a part of.
“I agree entirely, and Will Gluck, I think, is the third piece of that jigsaw where, you know, you’re getting to work with someone who is brilliant in this world, in every world. But in this world in particular, you know, Friends With Benefits and Easy Aand Anyone but You. I love those movies now. And I’ve watched them over and over. So to get to be in a movie that he’s making is a gift. And to watch him work, and he’s kind of like an adrenaline junkie, man. Like you had the script and we did two weeks of rehearsals, and we like, fine-tuned things and rewrote things, and then you get to set and he would say let’s mix it up, and so we try different things and we remold a scene, and it was really exhilarating for me, I’m sure for you, too. A safe space to fall on your face and try stupid things. It was an incredibly liberating experience for me.”
One Night Only arrives in theaters on August 7. Check out our exclusive new image above and stay tuned here at Collider throughout the rest of the week for more new looks at upcoming films from our summer preview series.
