It’s hard to remember now, nearly a year into the legal and reputational slugfest that is Justin Baldoni v Blake Lively, that It Ends With Us, the film at the heart of so much litigious mudslinging – predominantly and relentlessly, it should be noted, by Baldoni’s legal team – was a Hollywood success story.
The first big-screen adaptation of bestselling author Colleen Hoover, an initially self-published romance writer catapulted by BookTok to cult-figure status under the mononym CoHo, successfully elevated what many have dismissed as trauma porn fetishizing abuse into glossy, but effective and emotionally mature, adult theatrical fare. Lively, a Taylor Swift-adjacent style icon (to some) who excels at warm-hearted melodrama, was the perfect anchor for a film targeting what celebrity gossip columnist Elaine Lui termed the “minivan majority” (exurban/suburban, white, middle-class women); the film grossed $350m, against a $25m budget, making it one of the biggest hits of the summer.
