YouTube / Bleecker Street
The film -- which is also directed and co-written by Ryan -- marks the actress' return to the romantic comedy genre and is her first movie in eight years.
Meg Ryan is back -- and in the genre that launched her career.
On Wednesday, Bleeker Street dropped the trailer for What Happens Later, which marks Ryan's highly-anticipated return to romantic comedies. The actress -- who also directed the project -- stars in the film alongside David Duchovny.
The rom-com's synopsis, per Bleeker Street, reads: "Two ex lovers, Bill (David Duchovny) and Willa (Meg Ryan) get snowed in at a regional airport overnight. Indefinitely delayed, Willa, a magical thinker, and Bill, a catastrophic one, find themselves just as attracted to and annoyed by one another as they did decades earlier. But as they unpack the riddle of their mutual past and compare their lives to the dreams they once shared, they begin to wonder if their reunion is mere coincidence, or something more enchanted."
Not only does Ryan star in the film and serve as the director, but she also co-wrote the project alongside Kik Lynn and Steven Dietz, who wrote the play Shooting Star, which the film is based on. What Happens Later is produced by Jonathan Duffy, Kelly Williams, Laura D. Smith, and Kristin Mann.
While speaking with Entertainment Weekly in an interview conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike, Ryan, 61, opened up about how the film draws inspiration from Nora Ephron. (Ryan famously starred in three of Ephron's movies: When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and You Got Mail (1998).
"Sometimes there's a question of: Will they be together? Will they not be together? For that reason, [What Happens Later] sort of evolves the rom-com genre just a little bit," she told EW. "It's also about old people, and it's still romantic and sexy."
"It has a relationship to movies from the '40s, like Bringing Up Baby, in terms of the banter and the rhythm of things and a lot of that era of filmmaking," she added. "Nora Ephron used to say about rom-coms that they were really a secretly incredible delivery system to comment on the times, and we do that in this movie."
While What Happens Later marks Ryan's return to rom-coms, it is also her first acting role in eight years. It is her second time directing. She made her directorial debut with the 2015 film, Ithaca.
Watch the trailer, above, and check out some stills from the film, below.
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What Happens Later hits theaters on October 13.
