‘Shadowhunters’ Star Leads a New Enemies-to-Lovers Romantasy Rom-Com

It seems that you can’t walk into a bookstore these days without seeing half a dozen fantasy trilogies titled The Something of A Thing & Another Thing. Now, a new romantic comedy is taking a satirical look at the romantasy phenomenon—while still keeping the romance in the picture. Collider is proud to exclusively announce that Romantasy & Ruin is now in production in scenic Quinte West, Ontario.

The movie will feature an odd-couple pairing of characters thrown together by circumstance. Darcy (Holly Deveaux, who starred in the fantasy series Shadowhunters) is the bestselling author of An Account of Romantasy and Ruin, a best-selling trilogy of novels that’s about to get a big-budget Hollywood adaptation; she’s already written up a screenplay to take to the movie’s producers. Connor (Jesse Rath, Supergirl‘s Brainiac-5) is a Silver Bear-winning filmmaker who can barely conceal his contempt for the romantasy genre—and he’s just been hired to write the movie. Now, sparks are going to fly as this enemies-to-lovers duo have to work together to get this project off the ground, even as it goes from movie trilogy, to premium cable series, to streaming series, to vertical micro-drama.

In addition to Deveaux and Rath, Romantasy & Ruin also stars Damian Romeo (Ginny & Georgia), Brett Geddes (The Boys), Foad HP (Mayor of Kingstown), Sana Asad (Kim’s Convenience), Farleena Khan (Ripple), and Trevor Martin (Odd Squad). Melissa D’Agostino (The Christmas Witch Trial of Le Befana) will pen the script; she will also co-direct with Matt Campagna (Six Days to Die) and act in the movie. It’s a production of HighballTV and Hitsby Entertainment. Romantasy & Ruin is now in production; Collider has an exclusive behind-the-scenes production still below.

Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.

You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.

• This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
  fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
• You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
  everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
• The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
  every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
• You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.

You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.

• One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
  each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
• You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
  somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
• The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
  harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
• You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
  it.

You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.

• Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
  a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
• You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
  Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
• The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
  rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
• You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
  got told wrong.

You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.

• Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
  which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
• You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
  something nobody thought to test for.
• The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
  every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
• Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
  difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.

What Is Romantasy?

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    Image via Noah Czernecki</figure>