Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us adaptation faces controversary

Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel adaptation, It Ends With Us, has received criticism surrounding the differences between the movie and novel.

Hoover is an avid author whose success has been compared to Dr. Seuss and James Patterson. In 2022, Hoover held six of the top ten in The New York Times’ paperback fiction best-seller list.

As of August 2024, It Ends With Us has spent 165 weeks on The New York Times’s paperback fiction best-seller list.

The book has been awarded the Goodreads Best Romance and Number 1 Sunday Times Bestseller UK, but there has been controversary surrounding the film.

Firstly, readers were stunned with Blake Lively, aged 36, being the lead character in the film. The protagonist is Lily Bloom who experiences domestic abuse and goes on a journey to overcome her childhood traumas.

In the novel, many readers believed that Lily Bloom was in her twenties.

In an interview with Today, Hoover explains that as authors they sometimes “make mistakes”, addressing the occupation of Ryle, played by Justin Baldoni, who is Lily’s abusive love interest.

“There’s no 28-year-old neurosurgeons, you know? You go to school for 15 years. And so to make corrections to what I messed up in the book, we aged the characters up somewhat.”

In response to having to make Ryle older than he was in the book, Hoover adjusted Lily’s age as well.

The other controversy is the movie’s depiction of domestic violence, as it has been described to have downplayed the domestic violence showcased in the novel.

The film blurs out most violent scenes and minimises the abuse, while still portraying Ryle as an unnerving, assertive, and charismatic character.

DomesticShelters.org — a website that provides resources for victims and survivors of domestic violence — has condemned Hoover’s story for romanticising red flags and glorifying a charismatic-but-dangerous man.

As of 12 August 2024, 45 Australian women have died due to violence. The Australian Government reports from 2022 to 2023, on average, one woman was killed every 11 days and one man was killed every 91 days at the hands of an intimate partner.

In Texas, Hoover’s place of birth, there has been an upward curve in family violence incidents since 2018.

On Today, Hoover shared that the domestic violence components were loosely based on her childhood. She expressed that “there were no resources for women to leave”, but her mother did divorce her father when she was two.

According to MovieWeb, the story does not send a clear message about abusive relationships since it maintains a relationship between Lily and Ryle.

The greatest concern by anti-domestic violence advocates is that young individuals may read the book or watch the film and fail to understand why the relationship between Ryle and Lily is toxic.

Despite the controversy, the film has had a US $80 million ($121 million) opening, while its production budget was US $25 million ($38 million). It Ends With Us was released on 9 August 2024 in most cinemas around the world.