It Ends With Us — starring Blake Lively (who also produced) and Justin Baldoni (who also directed and executive produced) — had a stellar opening at the box office, no doubt boosted in part by online speculation about a rift between the co-stars.
What’s the film about?
It Ends With Us, an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s 2016 bestselling book about a love triangle between florist Lily Bloom (Lively), neurosurgeon Ryle (Baldoni) and her first boyfriend, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), is a romantic drama tackling tricky subject matter — domestic abuse — with mixed takes on how that’s depicted in the film. Audiences have liked it, giving it an A- on CinemaScore and a 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes as of Monday afternoon.
In its opening weekend, the Sony Pictures film made $50 million at the box office, playing at 3,611 venues in North America. It made another $30 million internationally. Domestically, it came in just behind Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds’s film Deadpool & Wolverine, in which Lively also had a cameo.
It Ends With Us had a “sensational opening for a dramatic romance film,” according to movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research’s David Gross. “Pure romance is not a big performer at the box office, but occasionally the right story based on the right book comes along, and with a well-cast female lead the movie catches fire.”
Hoover also penned a bestselling sequel, 2022’s It Starts With Us, and the assumption is there will be a big-screen telling of that too.
What’s the drama?
Around the film release, there was speculation of tension between Baldoni and Lively. It started with chatter on TikTok and X and was seemingly confirmed by a Hollywood Reporter story talking about a creative fracture between the two stars.
According to the outlet, Lively and Baldoni disagreed during the postproduction process about what the final film would look like. So Baldoni, the director, worked on his cut of the film, and Lively, the EP, commissioned her own version from a different editor (Shane Reid, an editor on Deadpool & Wolverine). It’s unclear if any of Lively’s cut was used in the final film.
As the press for the film rolled out, that same fracture seemed obvious. Baldoni — the film’s star and director — didn’t participate in the film’s press junket. When Lively gave interviews, she didn’t mention him by name. She punted on one of Yahoo Entertainment’s questions about working with him. Similarly, Jenny Slate, who plays Lily’s best friend in the film, completely talked around a question about him on a red carpet. Further, internet sleuths noticed that Lively and Hoover both unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram (though he follows them).
At the film’s NYC premiere on Aug. 6, Baldoni didn’t pose with Lively, Slate or the rest of the main cast. Inside the premiere, Lively and Hoover addressed the audience without him. According to Page Six, that’s because they weren’t even in the same theater watching the film.
Baldoni was with his wife, Emily, who had a small role in the film, and friends in one theater at AMC Lincoln Square while Lively and her family and friends were in another. Later that week, Baldoni hosted a screening in Chicago on Aug. 8 while Lively was in London promoting the movie.
The same outlet reported, via multiple unidentified sources, that Baldoni made it an “extremely difficult” atmosphere behind the scenes for the entire cast. One claimed he made Lively feel “uncomfortable” about her postpartum body, having just given birth to her fourth child. After leaked set photos had fans calling out her “frumpy” costumes, she started using her own outfits for her character and borrowed some from her friend, model Gigi Hadid. However, Baldoni insiders said he would never intentionally make any of his actors feel unsupported.
What have cast members said about working with each other?
The cast has not directly addressed the perceived drama. So everything cast members have said — or avoided saying — in interviews is getting a deep analysis. Here are the highlights.
Baldoni: While he didn’t participate in the press tour, he has done several one-on-one interviews and sung Lively’s praises.
“I don’t think people realize how involved she was in this movie,” he told Access Hollywood. “She’s a producer on the film, from the beginning to the end. She was extremely involved. She really made the film better. There were many instances where I honestly just tried to get out of the way and let her take the lead.”
In conversation with Today, Baldoni talked about the challenges of making a film, saying it’s about “navigating complex personalities and trying to get everybody on the same page with the same vision.”
In the same interview, he said because his character is abusive, it was important to him to step back a little to let the intimacy coordinator and stunt coordinator take the lead in the sensitive scenes involving domestic violence. He went on to praise Lively here as well.
“You can’t summarize Blake’s contribution in a sentence, because her energy and imprint is all over the movie and really, really made the film better, and from beginning to end,” he said. He went on to call Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, who apparently rewrote a pivotal scene in the script, “a creative genius.” Asked if he’d work with the couple again, he said, “If they’d have me.”
But Baldoni didn’t seem keen on pairing up for a sequel. He told Entertainment Tonight there are “better people” to direct/star in an It Ends With Us sequel. “I think Blake Lively’s ready to direct, that’s what I think,” he said, which many felt was a dig.
Baldoni also tried to explain his minimized role at the premiere to the same outlet. He said it wasn’t his night, it was about Lively, Hoover and women for whom the film was made.
Lively: The actress seemed to make a point not to say Baldoni’s name. When she was asked by Yahoo about building trust with Baldoni as a scene partner, she talked around him, not mentioning his name.
“I mean, this movie was such a challenge because you have scenes that are deeply painful and traumatic and physical. But you also have scenes that are full of levity, light and romance,” Lively said. “And normally when I see this type of character like Ryle onscreen, you know what’s gonna happen. And you’re like, ‘Ah, that guy’s full of red flags.’ But the way that Colleen wrote Ryle … I think that’s why the story resonates with so many is [because] you get why Lily stays. You get why Lily chooses to believe a different reality because you’re watching her in real time. You too are going, like, ‘I know what I just saw, but I don’t want to, maybe I didn’t just see that.’ That is the magic of this film — how she made these characters so winning.”
In the same interview, she talked about how she’s “never had such a challenging experience in my career.”
Lively also broke the news that Reynolds wrote a key scene at the beginning of the movie, telling E!, “The iconic rooftop scene, my husband actually wrote it.” Not even the screenwriter knew that until Lively spilled the beans. (The film’s screenwriter wasn’t even aware.)
In an interview with Today, Lively talked extensively about how she used her own clothing — and borrowed pieces from Hadid — for her character.
Slate: The actress, who plays the sister of Baldoni’s character in the film, also completely sidestepped the question about having the actor/director as a screen partner.
“I mean, what an intense job,” Slate replied in the clip that has gone viral. “To have to do so many things.”
She went on to talk about how she preferred to have just one job at a time and talked about how it was special to be a writer, ending with “I’m good with just acting” and not mentioning Baldoni by name.
Hoover: The author, who executive produced the film, sold the movie rights for her book to Baldoni’s production company. It was in those early stages that she asked him to star in it as well.
Hoover told Yahoo that Baldoni “struggled a little bit” taking on both roles but “pulled it off.”
In the same interview, Hoover — who did press with Lively — praised her leading lady for doing “a phenomenal job” in the film, adding, “I couldn’t be happier.” She echoed that in an interview with TheWrap, saying that Lively was who she wanted to play the role and the actress proved her right “every moment she was onscreen as Lily.”
Sklenar: The actor, who played Lily’s childhood sweetheart Atlas, did talk about working with Baldoni, telling People he did a “great” job juggling his roles as actor, director and producer.
“The entire crew that he ensembled was so incredible,” he added. “Everybody in this film is just on the top of their game across the board. It was a really pleasant environment to work in.”
Perceived ‘drama’ not hurting the film’s bottom line
At the end of the day, all this does is bring more attention to the film. Crisis public relations pro Molly McPherson shared her take on Instagram, speculating it could be “manufactured” drama to help the film’s bottom line. She talked about the movie being geared to young females, quipping, “Do young females like drama? Of course they do.”
