Nearly two years on, it seems we’re still futilely chasing the high of summer 2024. Charli xcx’s hedonistic Brat-era mockumentary just flopped on the big screen. Espresso still plays at the grocery store but doesn’t hit the same. Kamala Harris is maybe considering a run for something. And the movie It Ends With Us, the glossy adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel that became a somewhat surprise late-summer blockbuster, refuses to die.
That film, directed by Justin Baldoni and starring Blake Lively, should have been a Hollywood success story: a deceptively sharp melodrama that proved that frankly sentimental, female-led, 90s-style studio fare could still draw audiences to cinemas, that schlocky BookTok material need not necessarily beget schlocky movies and that Lively could appeal to the Target demographic. Nevertheless, it cast a dark shadow. The legal mudslinging over Baldoni’s alleged sexual harassment on set has tainted primarily her reputation, and extinguished any box office glow. (Lively v Baldoni – her case, not his, as the latter was dismissed – will go to trial in May.) And then there’s the inevitable pipeline of follow-ups with near-guaranteed diminishing returns, the first of which, a dreadful grief/love quadrangle/YA mess called Regretting You, threatened to kill the buzz for CoHo adaptations entirely last October.
