(Updated 01/29/2024)
One of the most popular books of the last decade is coming to movie screens. Colleen Hoover's IT ENDS WITH US, a romance novel featuring three great characters and some very heavy themes, became a runaway best-seller in 2021, five years after publication. A movie quickly went into production starring Blake Lively (seen above in A SIMPLE FAVOR), and fans have been eagerly following development of the movie and picking apart set photos for nearly a year.
Now IT ENDS WITH US is nearly finished filming. While we wait for official photos and a trailer, here's everything you need to know about IT ENDS WITH US.
What's the It Ends With Us Release Date?
Sony Pictures will release IT ENDS WITH US on June 21, 2024. The movie was previously scheduled for April 2024, but has been moved to summer.
Is There a Trailer for the It Ends With Us Movie?
Right now there is no trailer for IT ENDS WITH US. Despite the fact that production began in May 2023, the dual writer and actors strikes caused filming to be suspended until the beginning of January 2024. So the movie is still filming. We expect to see footage soon, and as soon as a trailer arrives we'll update with the footage.
The Cast of It Ends With Us
Blake Lively leads the IT ENDS WITH US cast as Lily Bloom. The choice has been controversial among fans, because the book's version of Lily is a 23-year old, while Lively is 35. Similarly, another major character, romantic interest Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgeon, is described as being 30. In the movie, Ryle is played by Justin Baldoni, who also directs the film.
Choosing actors who are significantly older than the characters in the novel was no accident. Hover has explained that "Back when I wrote It Ends With Us, the new adult [genre] was very popular... You were writing college-age characters. That's what I was contracted to do." There's just one problem. "I didn't know that neurosurgeons went to school for 50 years," Hoover explained. "There's not a 20-something neurosurgeon."
So the casting choices were made to counter that error. "As I started making this movie, I'm like, ‘We need to age them out because I messed up,’" she said. "So that's my fault."
Along with Lively and Baldoni, the cast features Isabela Ferrer as young Lily, Brandon Sklenar as Atlas Corrigan, Alex Neustaedter as young Atlas, Jenny Slate as Allysa, and Hasan Minhaj as Marshall.
A BookTok Success
Never underestimate the power of BookTok. Colleen Hoover's novel "It Ends With Us," about Lily Bloom and the two men in her life, was published in 2016. Hoover was a modestly successful author with more than ten novels in print when "It Ends With Us" went to the printer.
Then, in 2021, book communities on TikTok started talking about the novel. Soon "It Ends With Us" was a number-one bestseller, five years after publication. Many of Hoover's other books enjoyed similar surges in popularity.
"It Ends With Us" was optioned to become a film in 2019, but it wasn't until that BookTok explosion that the movie development really pushed forward.
Will There Be a Movie Version of It Starts With Us?
In 2022, a sequel to "It Ends With Us" was published under the title "It Starts With Us." We won't even describe the basics of the plot to avoid any spoilers for the first book and movie. But fans are already wondering if there's a sequel movie in the works.
There's no news on any movie sequel development as yet, especially since production on the first movie was delayed by strikes. But if IT ENDS WITH US does well when it opens in June there's a good chance that a sequel would be announced shortly afterward.
Will There Be a Verity Movie?
Hoover has written many novels, and most have no relation to "It Ends With Us." Her 2018 novel "Verity" is probably the most popular among them, leading to many questions about whether or not there will be a movie based on "Verity." All we know at this point is that, in October 2021, a publishing group acquired rights to "Verity" and also noted that a film was in development at Amazon.
Since that was more than two years ago, and we've heard no further developments, it's difficult to say whether or not we should expect to see a big-screen adaptation of "Verity" alongside IT ENDS WITH US.
IT ENDS WITH US opens on June 21.
All images courtesy of Sony Pictures.