Arriving as counter-programming to her husband’s No 1 Marvel skit Deadpool & Wolverine, Blake Lively’s glossy, and often rather graceful, romantic drama It Ends with Us is also trying to appeal to a powerful and vocal fanbase. Two of them, in fact, just one more obviously than the other.
It’s based on the bestseller by Colleen Hoover, a self-published phenom who rose to ubiquity thanks in part to the rabidity of BookTok and also a Covid-inspired rise in escapist forms of reading at home. Her novels have sold over more than 20m copies worldwide, with It Ends with Us being the most popular. Her female fans are so intense that Hoover, known as CoHo, sells branded press-on nails, quote-covered sweatshirts and character-inspired earrings (her followers are known as the CoHort of course). Hoping for a Fifty Shades-adjacent hit, rights were smartly snapped up for an inevitable adaptation, and it’s one that’s also been cleverly marketed to another, even more intense and financially powerful group of fans: Swifties.
