It Ends With Us: A marketing success and a crime against cinema

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A scene from the movie It Ends With Us. Photo: Sony Pictures/Nicole Rivelli

The highly anticipated film adaptation of the best selling novel It Ends With Us has gone viral, but not for what plays out on screen.

Is the feud between the co-stars of It Ends With Us a genuine clash of creative minds, or simply a clever marketing strategy that has spiralled out of control?

The highly anticipated film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's best-selling novel hit cinemas in August, and as soon as the cast stepped onto the red carpet, rumours of clash between lead actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni started.

In Saturday's episode of The Detail, Kate Rodger explains how the drama has played out. She says that from the moment press for the film began, fans on social media were suspicious about why Lively and Baldoni appeared separately.

"Instantly their 'spidey senses' noticed that they were never photographed together and when you've got two main stars in a film that did seem slightly unusual," she says.

In the beginning, sources claimed Baldoni made Lively feel uncomfortable on set and that he was frustrated with how much sway Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, had on the creative direction of the film.

But this very quickly flipped, with the backlash now largely focused on Lively.

The film deals with domestic violence, and critics on social media have been unimpressed with the star's treatment of that theme, claiming the way she has framed the film as fun, girls'-night-out activitiy is misleading and inappropriate.

That was something that surprised Rodger, too.

"I was fascinated that before or after there was no slate saying, 'if any of this is triggering...', I know they have that a lot when we're dealing with abuse or mental abuse or any mental health issues on screen. With something like this I would've expected something [like that] to come up," she says.

But Rodger is careful when taking sides, saying ultimately no one, aside from cast, crew, and close acquaintances, truly knows what goes on behind closed doors.

"Everyone's got an opinion and a lot of it is based on the fact that we don't have Blake sitting here in the room, we don't have anyone sitting here in the room that was on set, that was an eyewitness to all of this," she says.

But regardless of what happened on set, and what's played out since, Rodger says the box-office numbers prove the adage that no press is bad press. The film has performed better in the box office than any other romantic comedy-drama since 2018's A Star is Born.

Find out more about what's behind the drama and the marketing strategy, as well as why Rodger thinks that the film was a 'crime against cinema' on this episode of The Detail.