The It Ends With Us Movie Almost Made 1 Big Change From The Book
The Colleen Hoover fans were so not here for this.
Book lovers know the distinct pains and pleasures of seeing your favorite read get turned into a moviel. The story you loved is now much more digestible, mainstream, and full of life than ever before, but no film can fully capture every single detail from the pages of a novel. A lot of times, beloved passages are tossed aside in movie adaptations, and that was almost the case with It Ends with Us. The initial script rephrased one of Colleen Hoover’s romance novel’s most quoted lines, but luckily, a group of devoted fans stepped in to protest the change.
Christy Hall, a screenwriter and producer for It Ends with Us, shared that her first draft of the movie’s script reworded Lily Bloom’s firm declaration. In a climactic moment of the book, Lily says the title phrase to her daughter to let her know the cycle of abuse will not be passed down: “It ends with us.” Hall wanted to change that line for the movie.
“As a screenwriter, a big no-no is you don't want any character to ever say the title of the film,” Hall told Entertainment Weekly. “I had her say the line, ‘It stops here, between you and me,’ blah, blah, blah. I didn't have her say, ‘It ends with us.’”
However, this change didn’t sit well with fans of Hoover’s book. Hall revealed that she and Hoover hosted a roundtable with a group of fans, and their biggest issue with the script was the removal of that line.
“The entire room of 20 megafans were like, ‘You have to say it!’” Hall said. “I was like, ‘I'm sorry, forgive me! I was testing it out!’ It was like a wall of voices screaming at me, ‘She has to say it!’”
In the end, Hall conceded to the fans, and the movie now includes Blake Lively’s character delivering the titular phrase. “I have to say, now, when I really watch the film, I'm like, ‘They were right and I was wrong,’” Hall said. “It's different in this movie. It is.”
She added that Lively’s delivery of the line has now elevated what she thought might be a mistake to her favorite part of the whole movie. “You need a talent like Blake Lively to pull it off, where it doesn't take you out [of the movie]. It actually is now my favorite moment in the film,” Hall said. “I am grateful that it's in there, and as it should be. I love that they read an early draft and they just didn't let me get away with it for one second.”
It Ends with Us premieres in theaters Aug. 9.
