If hearing him on “Las Culturistas” and seeing him in “Wicked” and on “Saturday Night Live” wasn’t enough, Bowen Yang is headed back to the big screen alongside Academy Award-nominee Lily Gladstone, and Kelly Marie Tran in “The Wedding Banquet.” Yang is also joined by “Fire Island” collaborator Andrew Ahn, who serves as director and co-writer on this remake of the classic 1993 LGBTQ rom-com from Ang Lee. Watch the trailer for the film below.
Co-written by the original film’s scribe James Schamus and also starring Han Gi-Chan, Joan Chen, and Oscar-winner Yuh-Jung Youn, the official synopsis for the film reads, “‘The Wedding Banquet’ follows a chosen family of four friends each struggling to navigate their adulthood responsibilities and relationships. Angela (Tran) and her partner Lee (Gladstone) have had repeated unsuccessful IVF treatments, and the financial strain is worsening. Min (Han) and his commitment-phobic boyfriend, Chris (Yang), can’t agree on taking their relationship to the next level, but Min’s student visa is running out. In an attempt to solve the friend group’s ever-growing problems, Min proposes marriage to Angela to secure his green card in exchange for funding Lee’s IVF treatment. When Min’s skeptical grandmother makes a surprise visit and insists on an extravagant wedding, the friends’ commitment to their scheme — and to one another — begins to waiver.”
“The Wedding Banquet” had its premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. In our review of the film, IndieWire said, “The story begins conventionally, churning out exposition to introduce the foursome. And for a while, each couple scarcely amounts to more than a broad stroke and a conflict. Lee is a charmer eager for her in vitro fertilization treatments to result in pregnancy, while the crankier Angela worries that her strained relationship with her mother (Chen) might impact her own parenting skills. The rudderless Chris and trust-fund endowed Min, meanwhile, are navigating Chris’s reluctance to commit to a marriage that would allow Min, who’s in danger of losing his green card, to stay in the country.”
Speaking to IndieWire at Sundance, Gladstone shared that she was able to influence not only how her character is presented but even her name. Originally supposed to be called Liz, Gladstone got Ahn to change it to Lee to honor the Indigenous community in the film’s setting of Seattle.
“I decided that, because it takes place in Seattle, [and] there is a significantly underrepresented tribal entity fighting for federal recognition, that is Chief Seattle’s [Si’ahl’s] nation, Duwamish,” the actress said. “Aren’t currently federally recognized as a tribe, they’ve been trying to be … for some time. So, art is transcendence, it’s how we shape societies, it was important for me to make my character Duwamish. A Duwamish person on Duwamish land has not really been seen in cinema before.”
Watch the trailer for “The Wedding Banquet below.” The film opens in theaters April 18 from Bleecker Street.
