The gossip started earlier this week. Amid the press blitz for the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling romantic drama-slash-domestic violence cautionary tale It Ends With Us, fans started to notice something seemed amiss. The film’s director and co-star, Justin Baldoni (who optioned Hoover’s book in 2019 and is also an executive producer on the project), was doing a lot of solo interviews. Blake Lively, the film’s other main star, was making appearances with castmates and with Hoover, gushing about how great everyone was… except that director guy who she also made out with onscreen, Baldoni. The main players in the cast do not follow Baldoni on Instagram — neither does Hoover — although he follows some of them.
By the time the film’s Aug. 6 New York City premiere concluded — at which Baldoni took not one photo with the cast or Hoover, nor did he introduce the film with them — the online whispers turned to shouts: There is behind-the-scenes drama plaguing It Ends With Us. And we must find out what it is.
Online sleuths leapt into action. TikTokers and X users posted deep investigations, dissecting photos, body language, and tidbits from interviews. So far, they’ve turned up… well, nothing concrete. But here’s everything we know to date:
It Ends With Us traces the romance between florist Lily Blossom Bloom (Blake Lively) and neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), who meet-cute on a Boston rooftop and fall in love. But when Lily’s former high school love Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar) enters the picture, her relationship with Ryle turns sour. Lily attempts to break generational patterns of trauma, while also grappling with her own abuse.
The press tour kicked off with the film’s trailer release in May. Lively did joint interviews with fellow cast members including Sklenar, Isabela Ferrer (who plays a young Lily), and Jenny Slate (the best friend). She answered hard-hitting questions about her character-inspired floral-accented wardrobe and her friendship with Taylor Swift (whose song “My Tears Ricochet” is used in the film). Baldoni did at least one quick TV interview with Hoover that month, where they stood arm-in-arm and he gushed about Lively. (“She could have chemistry with a rock, she’s so talented,” Baldoni says, which is obviously a compliment but also an acknowledgment their chemistry is fake!)
In June, Lively appeared with Sklenar, Ferrer, and Hoover at a surprise screening of the film at a book festival outside Dallas. Baldoni was not present — though he reportedly had recently been hospitalized with an infection.
Then all hell broke loose in early August. First, eagle-eyed fans noticed that Lively, Sklenar, Ferrer, Slate, and Alex Neustaedter (who plays a young Atlas) aren’t following Baldoni on Instagram. Hoover, who personally suggested Baldoni star in the film, and appears in his grid, also doesn’t follow the film’s director.
During interviews at the film’s premiere, things got weird. Asked what it was like to have Baldoni as both the film’s director and a scene partner, Slate sidestepped the question, rambling for 30 seconds about how “intense” it seemed and how she personally y’know just speaking for herself would much prefer to have “just one job.” OK.
When Lively divulged in a red-carpet interview with E! News that her husband Ryan Reynolds, who had nothing to do with this movie officially, wrote “the iconic rooftop scene,” that set more tongues wagging. Perhaps there had been creative differences between Lively and Baldoni, either before or after she brought her husband onto the project? (In the interview, Lively framed the intervention as ordinary and benign, saying of Reynolds, “He works on everything I do. I work on everything he does. So his wins, his celebrations, are mine, and mine are his.” Representatives for Lively and Baldoni did not respond immediately to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment on the matter.)
As for Baldoni, asked by Entertainment Tonight at the event whether he’d do “double duty” for an adaptation of It Starts With Us, Hoover’s sequel novel to It Ends With Us, he politely — and tellingly — backed off. “I think there are better people for that one,” Baldoni said. “I think Blake Lively is ready to direct. That’s what I think.” Many read the response as another hint that he and his co-star had battled for control over the project at some point.
Two days after the movie’s New York premiere, The Hollywood Reporter cited two unnamed sources who allegedly confirmed such a struggle between the two main stars, claiming that there had competing cuts made of the film in post-production.
Feverish speculation about infighting aside, It Ends With Us hasn’t been without other controversies. Both the book and the film — or at least the marketing campaign for the film — have come under fire for glossing over the seriousness of domestic abuse with too much gooey romance. (Baldoni, a self-proclaimed feminist who went viral for a 2017 TED Talk around redefining masculinity, stressed to ET at the premiere that he hopes the film makes an impact with women who’ve been affected by intimate partner violence, saying, “Maybe she sees herself on that screen and she leaves the theater and chooses something different for herself, that’s why I made the movie.”) But fans don’t seem dissuaded. Hoover’s book spent 132 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list despite the criticism, and the movie, which opened Friday, is projected to earn at least $40 million over this opening weekend.
Is the feud discourse fueling some of that buzz? Probably. Will we ever learn what really went down behind the scenes? Only time will tell.
