American best selling author, Colleen Hoover, is facing controversy for her novel’s movie adaptation “It Ends With Us,” a romance story identified for having prevalent themes of domestic violence. Starring Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni and Jenny Slate, “It Ends With Us” was filmed in New Jersey and was released on Aug. 9, 2024 after Justin Baldoni optioned, or “rented” out the rights to the novel to film a movie adaptation.
Readers have both criticized and adored the story “It Ends With Us” since the novel’s release date on Aug. 2, 2016. With the story selling more copies than The Bible in 2022, the audience surges with an abundance of opinions.
The topic of controversy that presents itself in “It Ends With Us” is the recurring theme of domestic violence and how it interferes with relationships and engrains harmful cycles. The story follows the experience of a young woman named Lily Bloom, who grew up in an abusive household. The novel follows Lily’s struggle to navigate through life and relationships without following the violent patterns of her childhood. A central part of the plot is Lily falling in and out of love with her abusive husband, Ryle.
In an interview with Today’s Jenna Bush Hager, Hoover spoke about her own experience with domestic violence and abuse, and how the story was inspired by her mother’s childhood and marriage to Hoover’s father. “I would ask her all the time, ‘How did you find yourself in this situation?’ And I decided to write a book about it inspired by her courage to leave my biological father,” Hoover said.
A common complaint among Hoover s readers is that the story portrays abusive relationships and how to deal with them very poorly. “The issue at hand, for many critics, is not that domestic abuse – a painful fact of life – is part of the narrative. Rather, it is that the behavior is central to the (doomed) love story in which readers are supposed to invest themselves,” CNN’s AJ Willingham said.
One line in the novel that readers feel gives the wrong impression to Hoover’s young and impressionable female audience is, “There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”
In January 2023, Hoover took the internet by storm when she announced the making of an “It Ends With Us” coloring book. “This is not okay. This coloring book shouldn’t be a thing,” one user said on Goodreads. Hoover made a public apology to her audience soon after. “The coloring book was developed with Lily’s strength in mind, but I can absolutely see how this was tone-deaf,” Hoover said. “I hear you guys and I agree with you. No excuses. No finger pointing. I have contacted the publisher to let them know I would prefer we don’t move forward with it. Thank you for the respectful discourse and accountability. Nothing but love.”
The film adaptation has not been without its controversy either. Fans were outraged to discover the casting for the film when American actress Blake Lively was casted as Lily Bloom.
Lily, who is twenty-three in the novel, is played by a 37-year-old Blake Lively. Ryle, Lily’s love interest, is about thirty in the novel and is played by forty year-old Justin Baldoni. Fans and critics alike were quick to note this alteration. Hoover addressed the controversy, referencing Ryle’s career as a neurosurgeon to explain the change. “As an author, we make mistakes. 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,” Hoover said.
Similarly, the internet criticized the cast’s promotion of the movie. “In an attempt to sell this movie, Lively has promised viewers the giggliest, girliest of times,” Vox journalist Alex Abad-Santos said.
Lively also promoted the movie on TikTok. “Grab your friends, wear your florals and head out to see it,” Lively said. There was tremendous backlash to this comment. “Wearing florals and rounding up the girlies to watch a woman get physically abused by her partner seems, at best, a strange missing of the point and at worst, extremely insensitive or out of touch with the subject of her movie,” Abad-Santos said.
Conclusively, “It Ends With Us” is a story intended to share the empowering experience of Hoover’s mother leaving her abusive marriage and starting a better life for herself. Although lost in translation, Hoover’s message spreads far and wide to fans and critics alike: have the courage to break free from toxic cycles.
