Grab your florals, one of the year’s most controversial films is dropping on Netflix!
ICYMI, you can finally weigh in!
2024 has had its fair share of Hollywood controversies. Still, one of the most memorable remains the one around the Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and Brandon Sklenar starrer It Ends With Us, based on the BookTok sensation novel by Colleen Hoover. If all that drama kept you from catching the film in theatres or on VOD, your time may have come. It’s finally going to be available to stream on Netflix.
Where can you watch It Ends With Us?
The film is available to pay and watch on several platforms. But in case you don’t want to spend your pretty penny (I get it, the holiday season is hard on our wallets), fret not, for It Ends With Us arrives on Netflix on December 9, 2024, and can be watched for free by those with a subscription.
It Ends With Us is a romantic drama that deals with themes of domestic abuse, gaslighting in relationships, and breaking the chain of generational trauma. You can catch the film and see for yourself just how great Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s chemistry is on screen in the first half, and then have the film’s second half bring you back to harsh reality. You can also ponder how there can ever be a sequel (oh, yes, there’s an It Starts With Us as well) when there’s so much drama between its cast!
What is the It Ends With Us controversy?
Oh, it’s a juicy one, reminiscent of the drama during the promotions of Don’t Worry Darling. Do you remember that old thing? It began with keen-eyed fans noticing that actor and director Justin Baldoni was conspicuously absent during promotions. Instead, Blake Lively led them along with the other cast members and author Colleen Hoover, but Baldoni was never with them. This spawned gossip about a tiff between Lively and Baldoni, with the cast and author allegedly siding with Lively. This rumor was fuelled further when actor Jenny Slate dodged a question about working with Baldoni during an interview.
Some reports suggested that Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds was involved in extensively rewriting a pivotal rooftop scene from the film without Baldoni’s knowledge. Others claimed there were two edited cuts of the film, one per Baldoni’s vision and another per Lively’s, and the latter became the final cut. Another rumor claimed Lively thought Baldoni had body-shamed her when he wanted to know her weight for a scene that required him to pick her up, which he maintained was because he had a bad back. The truth of any of these matters remains elusive.
When Baldoni did promote the film, he mostly spoke about the film’s message against domestic violence. Meanwhile, Lively’s promotional activities turned out to be a lot of florals and the launch of her new haircare line, Blake Brown. Many saw this as tone-deaf and unconcerned with the film’s serious conversation around DV. In one instance, a TikTok video where Lively asks women to “Grab your friends, wear your florals, and head out to see it,” stirred up a debate on whether it was okay to market a film with such heavy themes and completely sideline the message while projecting the film as a light romance, which it wasn’t.
All this and more followed the film’s release, with people picking sides and even switching them as new information came to light. In the end, it didn’t matter who “won” because the controversy did wonders for the film. It was surprisingly better than the novel (read our review). But the controversy helped grab people’s attention, got them into the theatres to watch the film so they could weigh in on the adaptation of what was already a controversial book, and the film ended up doing some unexpected numbers.
Now that it is dropping on Netflix, a lot more hot takes on the film and its surrounding controversy are on the way!
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