As the credits rolled for It Ends With Us, I turned to my colleague and said, “That was actually good!”
My initial reaction, before the It Ends With Us controversy taking over the internet, was surprise. I’m not a film critic, but the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s hugely successful bestseller of the same name, starring Blake Lively, was much more muted, thoughtful, and moving than I expected. Lively’s performance of florist Lily Bloom (yes, I know) had nuance and heft, newcomer Isabela Ferrer stood out as a young Lily, and from my vantage point as a layperson with no training in the area, the script handled its delicate subject matter of domestic violence well.
So why did I feel somewhat surprised to have enjoyed the film? Because the rollout has been awkward, strained, and at times bizarre. While it’s certainly fun to speculate on what exactly is going on behind the scenes (more on that later), the overall uneasiness that the public and media has shown with the movie and the controversy surrounding the book that inspired it is a telling reflection that we still don’t know how to talk about domestic violence and how it’s portrayed in popular media.
For those unfamiliar, Hoover’s book tells the story of Lily, a young woman on the verge of opening up her own flower shop in Boston when her father dies. At his funeral, Lily is unable to give a eulogy for a man she can’t think of “five nice things” to say about. We later learn through flashbacks that this is largely due to the fact that he abused her mother physically and sexually throughout her childhood. Shortly after her father’s funeral, Lily meets a hot neurosurgeon named Ryle Kinkaid (again, I know re: the name) when he interrupts her contemplating on a roof about her father’s death by having a violent outburst. Lily is a little wary of him but drawn to him nonetheless. They talk but don’t see each other again, until another run-in months later.
Lily and Ryle start dating, but an undercurrent of uneasiness runs through their relationship. Ryle slowly becomes more controlling and eventually physically abusive as Lily reconnects with her high school boyfriend Atlas (yep), who she befriended as a teenager when she found him squatting in an empty neighborhood house after escaping his abusive stepfather. Lily attempts to talk with Atlas, which only makes Ryle more jealous, culminating in a violent attack in which he tries to rape her. With Atlas’s help, Lily ends the relationship before finding out she’s pregnant. Though Ryle vows to work on his issues, Lily divorces him as a promise to her baby daughter that the cycle of domestic violence will “end with us.”
Hoover wrote the book, published in 2016, based on her own experiences as a child. She has said in interviews that her father was physically abusive to her mother, and that she wrote It Ends With Us to bring this type of violence to light. As it became a worldwide sensation—selling four million copies as of 2022 and hitting the New York Times bestseller’s list in 2021 and staying there almost every week since—Hoover called its success “bittersweet” due to its themes.
“It’s been on The New York Times for so long. But why?” she told Today in 2023. “Because people resonate with it. And it’s kind of a sad subject to resonate with.”
And as long as the book has been a juggernaut, it’s also been controversial. Many fans over the years have felt that the book’s heavy and triggering themes have clashed with the way it’s frequently discussed: as a “romance” novel with a fun, bright cover and sometimes as a “love triangle.” When the book’s publisher, Atria, announced it would be releasing a coloring book to go along with the novel, the backlash was so swift that it was immediately pulled.
What the first It Ends With Us controversy demonstrated is that the standard ways for publishers to market a blockbuster bestseller aimed at young women—merch, collabs with brands—don’t exactly work when the bestseller in question contains graphic depictions of potentially triggering subject matter. Once the movie adaptation was announced and as the press tour began, this misfit of audience versus subject matter has become even more stark.
This week, it became an internet obsession. Lively, the star and a bona-fide A-lister, has made the film’s promotion a big part of her personal brand in recent months, zeroing in on the floral elements of the story as her main aesthetic heading into the premiere. Taking cues from Margot Robbie’s now-iconic Barbie-themed press tour, which was followed by Zendaya’s tenniscore promotion for Challengers and Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s pink-and-green-themed appearances for Wicked, Lively has stepped out in numerous flora-and-fauna-inspired ’fits, from wearing literal blooms in her hair to a leather set with appliquéd daisies.
Lively has also leaned into the fact that her husband, Ryan Reynolds, is also promoting a summer blockbuster, Deadpool & Wolverine, at the same time. (His film came out July 26.) In a strategy reminiscent of the organically viral “Barbenheimer” of last summer, the couple has appeared all over the media together, usually with Reynolds’s costar Hugh Jackman (Jackman and Lively even covered Vogue together).
This media strategy has been reminiscent of a rom-com rollout at times. In one interview, Reynolds “surprised” Brandon Sklenar, who plays Atlas, with a mock grilling in which he teases Sklenar for making out with his wife and compliments him on his ass.
“Is that genetics? Do you have some sort of low-angle squat routine to pop that region in that way? I mean, what’s going on here, man?” he asks.
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And though Jackman is, inexplicably, everywhere during the It Ends With Us press tour (he’s even in the above interview!), there’s one person who has been suspiciously MIA: Justin Baldoni. Baldoni not only stars as Ryle in the film (apparently by Hoover’s request) but directed and produced it through his Wayfarer Studios. As the promotion kicked off this week, eagle-eyed fans noticed that he was completely separate from the rest of the cast during interviews and red carpet appearances. Not only is Baldoni not appearing with his castmates, he is not being discussed by anyone and it seems, at least according to the internet, actively ignored. Lively didn’t even mention him when discussing a pivotal scene in the film in which her character meets Baldoni’s, saying Reynolds actually wrote it.
“He works on everything I do,” Lively told E! News of Reynolds’s involvement. “I work on everything he does. So his wins, his celebrations are mine, and mine are his.”
This is weird because in that same article, Baldoni went out of his way to praise Lively as a “creative force.”
"Everything she touches, she makes better. I think we’re all here because of her, so I couldn’t be more grateful to have that opportunity,” he said.
The perceived drama has kicked off a flurry of speculation, ranging from allegations that Baldoni did something horrible on set that made everyone turn against him, to blaming Lively and Reynolds for “pushing” Baldoni out of the film. We don’t know the truth, but what we do know is that the whole debacle is only making the way the film has been presented to the public even more muddled.
This is a problem, because experts say that when popular media portrays intimate partner violence, it should be done with the utmost caution.
“As with many sensitive issues that could traumatize people, any depiction of domestic violence or intimate partner violence should be handled with care and viewers should receive some kind of ‘warning,’” Dr. Anthony Estreet, the CEO of the National Association of Social Workers, tells Glamour.
Estreet advises that marketing for the film should also include resources, like the telephone number to the National Domestic Violence hotline, which the film does include during the closing credits but doesn’t include on other promotional pages like its Instagram.
And while Lively has talked about the movie’s “tragic” and “inspiring” themes, in an interview with Deadline she said quite clearly that she doesn’t view the focus of It Ends With Us to be about domestic violence. “This is a story that covers domestic violence but isn’t about domestic violence,” she said.
But as some people online have noticed, one member of the cast has been talking often and openly about domestic violence in regards to the movie: Baldoni. In an interview with CBS News, he said he hoped the movie would change how people view domestic violence, especially men.
“I want men to go to the theater and in some ways see a version of themselves,” he said. “You have two very different characters. Both of them in Atlas and Ryle have had past trauma. One handles it very different than the other, and my other hope is the men who have not done the work, who have not done the work to heal, if they see bits of themselves in Ryle, have a chance to step back and say, ‘You know what, I don’t want to blow up my life. I don’t want to hurt the person I love the most.’”
As I sat there in the theater, shocking myself by growing teary at the scene in which Lively promises her baby to stop the cycle of abuse (I’m a softie for mother-daughter stuff after having my own), the thought that flashed through my mind was, Wow, this could really help someone. Thanks to Lively’s performance, Bloom’s bravery in that moment felt real, not like a caricature of some over-the-top depiction of abuse. And that can be powerful, says Dr. Stavroula Kyriakakis, an associate professor of social work at Adelphi University.
“When films depicting intimate partner violence are marketed effectively, there is a wide reaching opportunity for survivors to view the trailer and instantly recognize these more subtle yet insidious forms of abuse they have been experiencing in their own relationship, prompting them to seek help,”
I can imagine a young woman in a similar relationship watching the film and finding a source of strength, or seeing their situation in a new light. It was moving, it was effective, and it’s a real issue. As Estreet noted, “Each year, about 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner.”
“This is a good time to highlight how intimate partner violence can go unnoticed and is often disguised as ‘love,’” he says.
But in the days since, I am growing skeptical that the film can deliver that message effectively. It’s a shame, because it’s a message that’s needed.
