I Love the Smiths Meaning: The 500 Days of Summer Scene

On the surface it is a compliment: you like the same band I do. For Tom it is a sign that Summer is the one, and that is the point. Marc Webb, the director, told NPR that liking the same music can feel powerful, and called The Smiths "a sort of an ominous sign in terms of romance", because, as he put it, Morrissey has a reputation as the voice of heartbreak.

• In the film: the moment Tom takes one shared band as a sign. They do not end up together: by the end Summer has married someone else.
• In a chat or a DM: usually a quote of the scene, a way of saying you share someone’s taste, or a flirt, the way Summer does it.
• On TikTok: shorthand for the scene itself, a meet-cute over headphones that people recreate with a partner or a friend.

The song in Tom’s headphones is There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, from The Smiths’ third album, The Queen Is Dead (1986), with music by Johnny Marr and words by Morrissey. It came out as a UK single only in 1992, five years after the band split, and in the film it is the song that first brings Tom and Summer together. It is the answer to a question Google still suggests: "what smiths song is in 500 days of summer elevator scene".

Ten years after the film, Vice’s Alex Zaragoza wrote in 2019 that the elevator scene still divides viewers: sweet and romantic to some, contrived to others. Her point is that the scene shows more of Tom’s hopes than of Summer, and that his sense of fate rests on one of the band’s best-known songs. That split is part of why "I love the Smiths" works as a joke and as a flirt at the same time.

Searchlight Pictures posted the scene on TikTok in February 2024. People were recreating it long before the AI templates, and 2026 brought some of the most watched takes: a London street take in January passed 1 million plays, a couple’s "I said I love the smiths" in June 2.6 million, and a park bench version in October 772,900.

By 5 November 2026, the date of the earliest template posts we found, it had also turned into an AI template: two photos in, the elevator scene out. On 8 November #ilovethesmithstrend had 655 videos and 2.8 million views; of the 151 posts we sampled that day, by 126 creators, 70 were from the previous 24 hours. Most AI posts put famous couples in the elevator.

Google pairs "I love the Smiths" with The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and the mix-up makes sense: that story is full of The Smiths too. Its main character keeps coming back to their song Asleep in Stephen Chbosky’s 1999 novel, and the song is in the 2012 film. The line "I love the Smiths" and the elevator are from (500) Days of Summer.

Our I love the Smiths AI effect puts you and a friend in the elevator from two photos, one of you in headphones, with the template result’s own sound. 14 seconds for 7 credits at 480p, 12 at 720p or 24 at 1080p. To film it yourselves: how to do the I love the Smiths trend.

We have not rendered this effect ourselves yet: the clip shown is the template result it follows. The voices on the clip are the template’s own, so they will not sound like you. The only free part of RapVideo is one 2-second watermarked preview per Google account, of the default Hotel Lobby video, the Bulin 47 Freestyle or Tiny Desk; everything else is paid with credits.