Lindsay Lohan and Henry Golding to Star in Netflix Rom-Com 'Return to You'

LOS ANGELES, OCTOBER 5, 2026 — The Lohanaissance has a leading man. Lindsay Lohan will star in and produce Return to You, a new Netflix romantic comedy co-starring Henry Golding — reuniting Lohan with Mark Waters, the director of Freaky Friday and Mean Girls, more than two decades after those films made her a generational star.

The news broke Sept. 28 via Deadline’s exclusive report, and Netflix confirmed it the same day with an Instagram post showing Lohan holding up the script. Cameras are already rolling in Toronto: Lohan was photographed filming outside an office building on Oct. 1, business-chic in a black blazer over a black dress, laughing with crew members between takes.

The logline, per Deadline: set in 2008, the film follows “a powerful but lonely female attorney (Lohan) who mistakenly receives a very emotional DVD sent by a dying woman to her husband (Golding). With only the clues from the DVD as her guide, she sets out to find him.”

A Waters reunion, 22 years in the making

Waters directed Lohan in Freaky Friday (2003) and Mean Girls (2004) — the two films that, along with The Parent Trap, defined the early part of her career and, for a generation of millennials, the teen-movie genre itself. The reunion has been brewing: in an interview with Variety last year, Waters said he and Lohan had reconnected in New York while she was shooting a Netflix film and “did say it would be fun to find an excuse to do something together.” Return to You is the excuse.

Waters knows the Netflix rom-com machine well — his recent directing credits for the streamer include He’s All That, Mother of the Bride and La Dolce Villa — and Lohan knows it too: Return to You will be her fourth Netflix feature, after Falling for Christmas, Irish Wish and Our Little Secret.

The timing of the announcement was its own kind of marketing. On Oct. 3 — Mean Girls Day, the unofficial holiday marking the film’s “On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was” scene — Lohan and Waters posted a video recreating that exact classroom moment, with Waters sitting in for Jonathan Bennett’s Aaron Samuels. The video drew more than 4 million views on TikTok, more than 2 million on X and 1.4 million likes on Instagram, where Bennett himself replied: “This made me miss you two so much!” It doubled as a not-so-subtle reminder that the director and his star are very much back together.

Golding’s rom-com homecoming

For Golding, Return to You is a return to the genre that made him a leading man: Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Last Christmas (2019) established him as the rare modern rom-com male lead who could open a movie, with Monsoon (2020) and Daniela Forever (2024) filling out the résumé. More recently he’s been in franchise mode — Another Simple Favor for Amazon MGM Studios, The Old Guard 2 for Netflix and the second season of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers — making a 2008-set romance a deliberate step back into the lane where he first broke through.

The Lohanaissance, phase two

Lohan’s second act has been one of the steadier comebacks in recent Hollywood memory. After years away from the spotlight, she rebuilt on her own terms through Netflix’s rom-com pipeline — Falling for Christmas (2022), Irish Wish (2024), Our Little Secret (2024) — then reprised Anna Coleman in Disney’s Freakier Friday and booked the Hulu limited series Count My Lies, adapted from Sophia Stava’s bestselling novel, where she’ll star opposite Shailene Woodley, Kit Harington, Katherine LaNasa and Francois Arnaud. She told Empire last year that she likes being “fully involved” in her projects now, from the ground up — reading a script already visualizing where it’s going, what the character’s wearing. Producing Return to You is that philosophy in action.

The 2008 setting is the film’s quietest flex: four years after Mean Girls hit theaters, in an era when a misdelivered DVD could plausibly change a life. The producers — Brad Krevoy, Olivia Krevoy, Jimmy Townsend and Galen Fletcher as executive producers, with the script by Eric Champnella — are betting that a period romance about analog clues lands harder in a digital age. Production is underway now in Toronto; no release date has been announced.

For the weekend’s other screen stories, see ’Verity’ leading a sub-$100M box office weekend — and for more celebrity news, the $9.5 million Chris Brown settlement.