There are movies you get excited about and then there are movies that feel like someone at Netflix read your mind. Women Like Us is very much the second thing. Whoopi Goldberg, Jenifer Lewis, Vanessa Williams, and Vivica A. Fox are all starring in the same Netflix comedy, and if that lineup alone does not already have you setting a reminder, I genuinely do not know what to tell you.
The premise is doing exactly what it needs to do without trying too hard. A recently widowed woman gets dragged to the Hamptons by her lifelong best friends and sister on what would have been her 30th wedding anniversary. What starts as a girls' trip turns into a full reckoning with grief, marriage, and what it means to still have time left to want things. It is the kind of story that sounds simple on paper but lands completely differently when you have four actresses of this caliber carrying it.
The production behind this is genuinely stacked. The film comes from the Obamas' Higher Ground and Charles D. King's MACRO Film Studios, the studio behind Fences, Judas and the Black Messiah, and One of Them Days. This is actually the first time Higher Ground and MACRO have joined forces on a project, which makes the whole thing feel like a bit of an event. And the script was written by Ali Kinney with additional writing from Tracy Oliver, the woman behind Girls Trip and Harlem. Nobody writes Black female friendship with more specificity and more heart than Tracy Oliver, and that is not an opinion, it is basically a documented fact at this point.
Tasha Smith is directing, and if you have watched any of Bel-Air, Survival of the Thickest, or Mayor of Kingstown, you already know she can handle tonal range without blinking. She is also set to direct the Netflix film Tis So Sweet starring Taraji P. Henson, so she is clearly in a full creative sprint right now. Production on Women Like Us kicks off this fall in New York City, which means we are probably looking at a late 2027 arrival on the streamer.
While you wait, put on Girls Trip. It is on Netflix, it holds up completely, and it is basically the spiritual predecessor to everything Women Like Us is setting out to do. Four women, an emotional getaway, and the kind of friendship that tells you the truth even when you do not want to hear it. Same energy, different decade of life. That is the whole point.
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