This week, It Ends With Us hits theaters, and the casting of Blake Lively is the best part of the movie. The movie is an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s controversial, bestselling 2016 novel of the same name. It Ends With Us tells the story of Lily Bloom, who has moved to Boston to open her own flower shop. From there, the novel gets darker as Lily falls into a relationship with neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid and his mentally and physically abusive tendencies start to manifest and grow more pronounced.
Throughout the book, Lily struggles with choosing between her love of Ryle and love of herself, but the book is considered controversial and has taken a lot of criticism for what many readers believe is romanticizing abuse. It’s a valid complaint; the book can certainly be read that way, regardless of how it ends. But the casting of Blake Lively addresses a number of issues readers have with the book.
Blake Lively Is Older Than Lily Is In The Book
There was plenty of complaining from fans of the book when Blake Lively was cast as Lily, simply because Lively was 35 years old when she shot the movie compared to Lily’s 23 in the book. There will always be a certain segment of fandoms who complain about any casting – that’s inevitable. However, in this case, it fixes a big problem with the book, and that’s how young Lily was. At 23, she barely understood herself, let alone men or the world at large. it allowed her to be manipulated and gaslit and powerless for far too long against her abuser.
Fans who are mad about Blake Lively’s casting aging Lily up should probably listen to author Colleen Hoover. Hoover said in an interview with Today that it was she who requested the characters to be older:
“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. I made Lily very young. I didn’t know that neurosurgeons went to school for 50 years. There’s not a 20-something neurosurgeon. 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.”
Director and Ryle actor Justin Baldoni also has said he was far more comfortable making the characters older, as it would be more relatable to women of all ages. Further, both he and Hoover agreed that an older woman with more lived experience would rightfully express more agency, the lack of which was a real problem with the original It Ends With Us book. With Blake Lively, the movie signals it’s going in a different tonal direction with the book, which is necessary – we don’t need anymore Twilight or After movies that romanticize abuse and forgive the abusive male lead simply because he has a troubled backstory.
The Marketing Is More Up Front Than The Book
Secondly, the marketing for the movie does not hide the fact that while it’s a romance movie, it’s also a movie about unhealthy romance and breaking a cycle. The trailer, in the first minute, shows Ryle’s first violent outburst and it ends with a pivotal moment from the book in which Lily asks Ryle how he would feel if his daughter told him he was being physically abused by the man she loved. It’s being framed less as a story about loving someone else and more as a story about loving oneself.
It’s a far cry from the book, which was initially marketed as a love triangle and a straight romance story. The abuse was very much downplayed in the promotional material displayed to the public, which really angered a number of readers when they finally read the book and realized that it was about an unhealthy, abusive relationship and an unhealthy romanticization of it. In changing the marketing and being up front about the story, the movie is already acknowledging something the book didn’t and righting a wrong.
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