Three rom-coms to watch if you enjoyed Amazon Prime Video's Upgraded

Amazon Prime Video's Upgraded arrived this month with the kind of premise that has powered romantic comedies for decades: mistaken identity, a chance encounter, attraction blooming between two people who aren't quite who the other thinks they are. Camila Mendes plays Ana, an intern working under a exacting boss named Claire, portrayed by Marisa Tomei. During a flight to London, Ana gets upgraded to first class, where a stranger named William mistakes her for her employer. He's drawn to her immediately. The film struck a chord—it debuted near the top of Prime Video's most-watched movies list, which suggests the formula still works.

If Upgraded landed for you, there's a clear next move: The Other Zoey, also streaming on Prime Video, which happens to reunite you with Archie Renaux, the actor who played William. Here, Renaux takes on a different role in a similar tangle of mistaken identity. Josephine Langford stars as Zoey Miller, a woman who shares a name with someone else's girlfriend. When Zach MacLaren, played by Drew Starkey, suffers an injury that leaves him with partial amnesia, he confuses Zoey for his actual partner. A doctor advises Zoey not to upset him, so she maintains the deception while joining Zach and his friend Miles—that's Renaux—on a vacation. The complication arrives when attraction blooms between Zoey and Miles, just as Zach's real girlfriend shows up to reclaim her place.

For something with deeper roots in the rom-com canon, Sandra Bullock's While You Were Sleeping, available on Disney+, offers a masterclass in the mistaken-identity setup. Bullock plays Lucy Eleanor Moderatz, a solitary woman who has been watching a handsome stranger, Peter Callaghan, from a distance. When Peter is struck unconscious on railway tracks, Lucy saves his life. At the hospital, his family assumes she is his fiancée, and Lucy, mortified, says nothing to correct them. As she spends time with the Callaghans and their particular brand of chaos, she develops genuine affection for them. But Peter's brother, Jack, initially distrusts her. Over time, though, Lucy and Jack discover a spark that outshines her original attraction to Peter. The film then becomes a question: can they build something real after so many layers of deception have already been laid down?

Date Night, streaming on Max, takes the mistaken-identity premise in a different direction entirely. Tina Fey and Steve Carell play Claire and Phil Foster, a married couple trying to inject some excitement into their relationship by going out without their children. At a restaurant, they make a reckless decision to steal a reservation from another couple, the Tripplehorns. That small act of mischief spirals into genuine danger when it turns out the Tripplehorns are entangled with serious criminals. The Fosters are now mistaken for people involved in something far darker than a date night gone wrong, and they have to navigate their way out of the mess while trying to get home to their kids. Director Shawn Levy, who would later helm Marvel's Deadpool and Wolverine, blends romantic comedy with action-thriller elements, creating something that feels less like a pure rom-com and more like a couple's adventure that happens to be funny.

What connects these four films is not just the mistaken-identity plot device, but the way each one uses confusion and deception as a starting point for genuine human connection. In Upgraded, the mistake leads to romance. In The Other Zoey, it creates a love triangle. In While You Were Sleeping, it becomes the foundation for a relationship that has to survive the truth. In Date Night, it becomes the crucible that tests a marriage. If you found yourself drawn to Upgraded's particular flavor of romantic mishap, any of these three will offer you a variation on the same theme—each with its own texture, its own stakes, its own answer to the question of what happens when people fall for each other under false pretenses.