No, Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick are not feuding
Blake Lively can’t catch a break.
Late last year, it was reported that her It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni had allegedly launched a smear campaign against her after she accused him of sexual harassment. The case continues, with Baldoni denying any wrongdoing. In the meantime, Lively is pushing forward in her career, with one upcoming project being A Simple Favor 2 opposite Anna Kendrick.
The first A Simple Favor came out in 2018 and starred Kendrick as vlogger Stephanie alongside Lively as Emily Nelson. It received positive reviews and grossed $97.6 million worldwide, so a sequel seemed inevitable. It was announced in May 2022 that Kendrick, Lively, and director Paul Feig would all return for a new installment, and the project is in full swing … unless you believe a random blue tick on X going by the name of Eric B.
Eric B, seemingly trying to position himself as a legitimate movie news source and failing miserably, created a thread where he announced, “BREAKING: Amazon shelves A Simple Favor 2 indefinitely.” He then made up the news, “Despite glowing test screenings, Blake Lively’s refusal to promote—amid her messy legal battle with Justin Baldoni—and growing tensions with Anna Kendrick have derailed the sequel.”
Admittedly, the part about tensions didn’t come out of nowhere. Since 2017, rumors have spread that Kendrick and Lively didn’t get along. An MTV News interview added fuel to the fire when some of Kendrick’s jokes didn’t land. Later, an insider supposedly told the TikTok account Celebrity Memoir Book Club that the two women “HATED each other” and “the studio even had to have a talk with them about making it look like they liked each other on press tours because it was starting to get obvious.” Yet that was a DM sent to a TikTok account; it’s not exactly proof of anything. Plus, Kendrick and Lively’s co-star Henry Golding said he didn’t think there was a feud between them.
It truly seems like the “feud” between the two stars was blown out of all proportion. But, according to Eric B, “old tensions resurfaced” on the set of A Simple Favor 2. “Fans had hoped the reunion would bring back the magic of the first film, but instead, it became another chapter in the feud. Observers even noted what appeared to be veiled jabs on social media, sparking speculation that the drama wasn’t just on set,” he claimed. He went on to write that Lively was refusing to promote the film, something that was costing Amazon “millions”—yet he offered absolutely no proof of this.
Eyebrows were immediately raised about Eric B’s post since it seemed to borrow a page from Baldoni’s smear campaign against Lively. Then Feig himself got involved. “This is total BS,” he wrote in response to Eric B. “Sorry. The movie is finished and coming out soon. Don’t believe anything you read on social media these days.” When Eric B—who seems to be desperately angling for more engagement—questioned this by demanding to know when the film was coming out, Feig gave him a more measured response than he deserved, explaining, “Movies don’t come out the second they’re finished because the studio spends the previous year deciding the best date to release it. We’ve always planned on something in the spring/summer of this year. That’s how movies work.”
When you inspect Eric B’s account, the pinned post is an anti-Blake Lively one. Scroll down and you get much more anti-Lively content, plus the platforming of far-right accounts like Candace Owens. I think we can safely disregard him and anything he has to say about Blake Lively.
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