Nancy Meyers is probably the most successful woman filmmaker of all time, at least if gauged in relation to the terms determined by the Hollywood mainstream. While most of the filmmakers examined in this volume have not enjoyed sustained employment in the dominant or even independent sector, Meyers has managed to consistently produce films at the forefront of the US film industry for almost forty years now, obtaining sizeable budgets and directing box office hits such as What Women Want (2000), Something's Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), It's Complicated (2009) and, more recently, The Intern (2015). What Women Want, which she both produced and directed (and for which she also acted as an unacknowledged co-writer), went on to become both the highest-grossing romantic comedy ever, earning US$374,111,707 worldwide, as well as the most commercially successful film ever to be directed by a woman at that time.

Meyers's long career and directorial brand are unique in contemporary Hollywood – an industry that has routinely marginalised or excluded women filmmakers. Hilary Radner has argued that Meyers is one of the very few female auteurs of what she calls ‘neo-feminist’ cinema, which ‘facilitates the marketing of her films within Conglomerate Hollywood’ (2011: 172). In her ability to make her films marketable and to create a recognisable auteur identity, she constitutes yet another example of authorship as a commercial performance in Corrigan's (1991: 104) terms. Her visibility and success are significant, since, as Michele Schreiber observes, ‘while female directors have always been a rarity in Hollywood, those with name and “brand” recognition are even rarer’ (2014: 143).

In her valuable overview of Meyers's career thus far, Deborah Jermyn aptly observes that ‘if Meyers is recognised for anything among those familiar with her name, it is for being Hollywood's reigning “romcom queen”’ (2018: 57). The filmmaker is promoted, and actively promotes herself, in association with female-centred and female-oriented romance genre films, focusing on what she describes as ‘telling women's stories’ (in Freeman 2015).In this sense, she is positioned at the opposite end of the spectrum from Hollywood directors such as Kathryn Bigelow, ‘whose “brand” revolves around the fact that she is a woman who makes “men’s” films, much to the ongoing fascination of critics’ (Schreiber 2014: 144).