The Wedding Banquet Gives a Familiar Story a Radical New Ending

Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of The Wedding Banquet.

“I know it’s scary, but we have to let ourselves hope a little bit.” It’s mere minutes into The Wedding Banquet when Lee (Lily Gladstone) says this to her partner, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran). She’s referring to their IVF efforts, which have, to this point, not yielded results. It’s only been a couple weeks since the last implantation, so it’s too soon to say if Lee’s pregnancy will take, despite Angela’s chronically oversharing PFLAG mom May (Joan Chen) announcing that she’s going to be a grandmother. But the idea of embracing hope extends well past Lee’s IVF — it feels like a central tenet to The Wedding Banquet, an unapologetically queer film released in the midst of rapidly escalating government repression. If the 1993 Wedding Banquet presented an impressively progressive (for its time) vision of queer family, the new iteration invites us to dream bigger.

Both movies follow similar plot beats, with some notably different details. In Ang Lee’s original film, Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) is hiding his long-term relationship with Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein) from his conservative parents in Taiwan. When Wai-Tung agrees to marry Wei-Wei (May Chin) so she can get a green card and he can get his parents off his back, Mr. and Mrs. Gao (Lung Sihung and Gua Ah-leh) make a surprise trip to New York to meet their future daughter-in-law. Once there, they insist on a wedding banquet to honor the nuptials, and Wai-Tung is forced to maintain the ruse by moving Wei-Wei in and disguising Simon as his roommate. 

Andrew Ahn’s contemporary remake takes a different path to the same title celebration. Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan) have been dating for years, but Min’s visa is set to expire and his grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung), wants him to return to Korea to take over the family business. After Chris turns down Min’s hasty marriage proposal, Min and Angela decide to get hitched — Min will be able to stay in the U.S., and he’ll use his ample funds to help pay for another round of IVF for Angela and Lee, whose second attempt has just failed. As soon as Min informs his old-fashioned grandmother that he’s getting married, however, she flies to Seattle to meet Angela for herself. 

It’s here that The Wedding Banquet makes its first major diversion from its predecessor. One of the smartest choices in Ahn’s remake is the decision to drop the pretense for the marriage immediately. On Angela’s end, there’s no need to lie to her mother, though May will have to keep the truth to herself. (“What am I supposed to say at my PFLAG meeting tonight?” she demands.) But Min makes a real effort to fool Ja-Young, including moving into Angela and Lee’s home, and forcing them to clear it of any lesbian paraphernalia. It’s something of a surprise, then, when his grandmother arrives and doesn’t buy it. “I am not an idiot,” Ja-Young tells Min. “You want me to believe you’re sleeping with that woman?” This subversion of the story grounds the film in reality: As hard as it might have been to keep everyone in the dark about a lavender marriage in 1993, doing so in 2025 feels next to impossible.

There’s still a wedding banquet, naturally, but it’s not designed to fool anyone but Min’s homophobic grandfather, who Ja-Young says will only believe the marriage is legit if he sees it in the paper. Those coming into The Wedding Banquet expecting a farce might be disappointed by Min’s grandmother’s instant awareness, which shifts the story into new terrain. But it’s worth noting that Ang Lee’s movie is also less farcical than advertised, and just as grounded in complex relationships and real human drama. In that film, while the wedding banquet is a success, Wai-Tung does reveal the truth about his identity to his mother, who takes it about as poorly as expected. Wai-Tung’s father, however, privately reveals to Simon that he knows the marriage is a sham, and that he considers Simon another son. It’s a moving moment, complicated somewhat by Mr. Gao swearing Simon to secrecy — and explaining that he went along with the lie because it was the only way he’d get a grandchild.

Yes, the 1993 Wedding Banquet has Wei-Wei getting pregnant by Wai-Tung on their wedding night in a very unfortunate scene that, regardless of Ang Lee’s intention, reads as Wei-Wei sexually assaulting her husband. The new Wedding Banquet mercifully avoids these consent issues by having a blacked-out Chris and Angela falling into bed with each other, after which Angela gets pregnant. It’s not a particularly believable plot development — “Wait, you were the top?” Min demands of Chris after he finds out — but at least both parties involved appeared to be equally fucked-up at the time. And the pregnancy is essential to both versions of The Wedding Banquet, films that turn out to be less about fooling conservative relatives and more about the creation of a new kind of family. In the original movie, that’s Wei-Wei deciding against an abortion and opting to have the baby, inviting Wai-Tung and Simon to be fathers to her child. Even if arrangements like this had existed long before audiences saw them onscreen, the family unit that emerges feels quietly radical for when the film was released.

But it’s 2025 now, and we’re not so easily impressed. The last few decades have invited a much broader understanding of sexuality, gender, family, and relationship dynamics, so it’s fitting that Ahn’s Wedding Banquet concludes with a more expansive vision than its predecessor’s. Marriage itself has, of course, changed, which allows for the kind of ending that wasn’t possible 32 years ago: As Angela and Min prepare to be legally wed at the courthouse, Chris interrupts the proceedings to propose to his boyfriend. Ja-Young, who has slowly come around to accepting Min’s sexuality and embracing Chris as part of the family, watches as her grandson gets the wedding he wanted all along. This Wedding Banquet concludes with a scene of Angela, Lee, Min, and Chris jointly raising two children, the kid Angela had after a drunken fling with Chris and the one Lee had through the IVF that Min funded. Despite how chaotic that household seems, it’s a picture-perfect finish.

As happy endings go, The Wedding Banquet’s feels almost too good to be true, though the wailing babies helpfully puncture the fantasy a bit. It’s hard to read the ending as anything but a deliberate escalation of the original: This Wedding Banquet starts with a leg-up on the 1993 film, giving us two gay couples instead of one, and it ends with more addition — where the first movie has one baby and three parents, the remake has two babies and four parents. Reducing the plot to basic math might seem silly, but it’s an honest reflection of the way Ahn’s film is building on what came before. However progressive the ending of the 1993 movie may be, it still takes deception and settling to get there. In the new movie, there is no necessary compromise, with the marriage of convenience abandoned entirely. Instead, everyone gets what they want (regardless of whatever inevitable complications follow), and we close on the creation of a queer family that’s more balanced and inclusive than what Ang Lee and co-screenwriters Neil Peng and James Schamus were able to envision. (Notably, Schamus returned to co-write the screenplay for the remake.)

But the six-person family unit isn’t what makes The Wedding Banquet radical — it’s the hope at its core. The happy ending feels downright utopian at a time when queer families are under attack. The Trump administration has shown a dogged determination to roll back civil rights, with the focus up to this point primarily on trans people. Same-sex marriage and the ability of queer people to adopt are far from safe. And that’s to say nothing of the crackdown on all forms of immigration, another key aspect of the Wedding Banquet story. None of this is new information to anyone paying even a little bit of attention, and the filmmakers are certainly aware of the political reality the movie is being released in (even if the situation wasn’t quite so dire during production). They’ve simply made a choice to present something aspirational. If the ending feels unrealistically idealized for the times we live in, that’s by design: “Hope is a radical act” might sound like a cliche at this point, but that doesn’t make it any less true.