By Owen Gleiberman

This weekend's stunning commercial triumph of "It Ends with Us," a darkly undercurrented romantic soap opera starring Blake Lively (it's about the only hit movie this summer that isn't an escapist fantasy), should give the entire film industry pause. It should tell the industry to make different kinds of movies. These kinds. But I'm not sure that Hollywood film culture, as it stands, can learn that lesson as long as it has a term like "chick flick" stuck in its head, and as long as it lazily and reflexively applies that term to a movie like "It Ends with Us."

For a long time, “chick flick” was a phrase that gave off a knowing, retro wink of ironic feminist power. I never liked the term myself, and refused to use it in my reviews. Still, I could see why it had become fashionable. The word “chick” was a sexist relic of the ’60s, and women using “chick” in a hip way was a bit like the homosexual reclamation of “queer.” It turned something condescending into something liberating. And the merging of “chick” with “flick” was, in its cutesy way, an affirmation of cultural identity.

It was all part of the new wave of self-conscious, party-animal feminism that had taken off around the time of “Pretty Woman” and was in full swing by the time of “Sex and the City.” A chick flick was, by definition, a romantic comedy or maybe, sometimes, a non-comedic romantic crybaby that women were drawn to out of some primal instinct. It was an update of the old studio system concept of the “lady movie,” and by the time the ‘90s were in full swing, there were so many chick flicks that even the cliché image of watching a chick flick had become iconic — the now-more-than-crime meme of a woman home alone, watching a guilty pleasure movie on late-night TV while laughing and crying into her pint of designer ice cream.