LOS ANGELES – The book “It Ends With Us” by American author Colleen Hoover has been firmly on the bestseller lists for years.
And now the film adaptation is a box office smash. Sony Pictures’ US$25 million (S$33 million) movie is expected to gross US$50 million in the US and Canada, box office analysts say.
Starring American actress Blake Lively in the lead role, the romance novel is based on Hoover’s most popular book – which was originally published in 2016 but resurfaced on the bestseller list in 2021 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and has remained there for around 140 weeks since then.
Boosted by TikTok, the book about a complicated love triangle with undertones of domestic violence sold 8 million copies and found fans around the world.
The low-budget film comes at a time when there is hardly anything on the market aimed at women. In contrast to mid-2023, when “Barbie” grossed $1.4 billion worldwide and became the highest-grossing film of the year.
Sony capitalized on this lack in the market with a powerful social media campaign that featured Lively, her husband, Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, made cameos, and her friend, American singer Taylor Swift, who contributed the song “My Tears Ricochet” to the film and trailer.
On August 9 alone, the PG-13-rated film grossed more than $24 million. Audiences saw 36-year-old Lively in the role of a florist with a troubled past who falls in love with a sexy and violent neurosurgeon played by American actor Justin Baldoni, who also directed the film.
It grossed another $13.7 million on August 10, and is expected to gross around $12 million on August 11. The film is scheduled to be released in Singapore on September 5.
The performance of “It Ends With Us” is a welcome boost to the box office, which is still down about 16 percent from this point in 2023.
“Pure love stories aren’t big box office hits, but sometimes the right story comes along, based on the right book, and with a well-cast female lead, the movie becomes a hit,” said David Gross, a film consultant who publishes a box office newsletter. “That’s what’s happening here.”
Reviews were mediocre, with The New York Times calling the film “erratically entertaining, sometimes touching, often ridiculous and, at two hours and ten minutes, almost insultingly long.”
Nevertheless, audiences give the film good marks. The audience rating from Rotten Tomatoes is 94 percent and the exit rating recorded by the tracking service CinemaScore is A-.
