After decades of being in the rom-com game, Hallmark has their movie format down to a science — but what happens when the stories take them overseas?
In Alison Sweeney and Ashley Williams’ 2025 “Passport to Love” movies To Barcelona, With Love and To Barcelona, Forever, that’s exactly what happened. The actresses, who appear in both films, traveled to Barcelona to shoot the movies and faced a few hurdles along the way.
“There is a real look [and] genre to Hallmark movies,” Williams exclusively told Us Weekly while promoting the back-to-back June releases. “It was really important that we, even though we were shooting in a different country, and the concept was a little bit outside the box, it was still really important that it had all of the feels and that it looked and walked and talked like a Hallmark movie just in a different location.”
She teased, “We brought Hallmark to Spain, and we were like, ‘Hi Spain, here’s how it goes.’”
In To Barcelona, With Love, Sweeney plays Erica, an American translator living in Barcelona, who is responsible for translating Anna’s (Williams) romance novel. However, when Anna arrives in town to promote the book, Erica confesses that she rewrote most of the plot leading to shenanigans and an unlikely friendship between the women.
To Barcelona, Forever is the next step in the story, following more of Anna’s journey following her writing debacle. “Anna has such a great arc in the first movie. And then I think that springboards her into the arc for the second movie,” Sweeney told Us.
While both films follow the Hallmark protocol of finding love through mishaps and missed connections, how they were made was a little different than most of the projects produced in Canada or the United States.
Scroll down to see what it takes to make a Hallmark movie in Europe — and what is fake vs. what is real: