The new Blake Lively movie about a romance that turns abusive is adapted from the bestseller by New Adult phenomenon Colleen Hoover. Will it be as popular – and as divisive – as the novel?
When the trailer for It Ends with Us dropped in May, it earned 128 million views in just 24 hours
The hullabaloo can partly be explained by the fact that the film’s co-producer and star is the talented Blake Lively, aka Taylor Swift’s friend, aka Ryan Reynolds’ wife.
But it’s mostly because It Ends with Us is based on a best-selling novel by 44-year-old-Texan, Colleen Hoover, who is viewed by millions of Gen-Z women as a goddess, yet has been accused of glamorising domestic abuse.
The issue with It Ends with Us, the big-screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s romance bestseller, isn’t its lack of sincerity.
It’s there in the tearful exactitude of Blake Lively’s performance, as a woman whose every step is traced by memories of a childhood spent in an abusive home, and her slow-dread realisation that those familiar patterns might exist in her current partner, Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, also the film’s director).
That’s a worthy subject for film – how abuse hides in plain sight, and blinds its targets with the illusion of love.
But then that tricky word, “romance”, comes skipping in from the sidelines, its arms heavy with trite sentiment. Lively’s character isn’t an everywoman, but a near-comical construct of the aspirational upper-middle-class, a walking Pinterest board.
Her name is Lily Bloom. She’s about to open her own flower shop, which charges $51 (£40) for the most basic arrangement. She comes from a place called Plethora, Maine, where every house is a colonial-style fever dream. She wears a leather pantsuit to her dad’s funeral, fearless when it comes to the threat of inappropriate mid-eulogy squeaks.
For many young women, there have been very few film adaptations as hotly anticipated as Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us.
The 2016 book became an internet sensation a few years ago – it took TikTok’s #booktok by storm with more than one billion tags and sold 20 million copies weeks as the number one New York Times bestseller.