It Ends with Us really should have been a slam dunk. Based on a novel by Colleen Hoover—a woman who, in 2022, literally outsold the Bible—last year’s film came ready-made with a built-in audience of millions. As a domestic-violence drama, it also walked the walk, rising above Hollywood’s usual empty noise. If star Blake Lively and director (and co-star) Justin Baldoni had played nice and gotten along, the film could have launched a franchise that earned billions.
Obviously, this was not the case. Because now It Ends with Us has been completely overshadowed by all the catastrophic backstage stories—all the feuds and fallouts and creative wrestling and omnidirectional lawsuits—about Lively and Baldoni, which since Christmas have become so deafening that neither of them look set to emerge fully intact.
A quick refresher: shortly after the film’s release, last year, rumors began to emerge about a rift between the pair. This is because they didn’t do any press together and (this was the smoking gun the Internet needed) Lively didn’t follow Baldoni on Instagram. The rift was said to be caused by Lively’s muscling in on production, using her producer credit to commission her own edit of the film.
But this was quickly forgotten as the dominant narrative soon became Lively’s ham-fisted promotion of the film. It Ends with Us is a movie about a woman named Lily who must find the strength to leave her physically abusive partner, Ryle. It is a dark story, and so the smart thing to do would have been to keep the film’s message front and center during the press cycle.
This hasn’t always been easy—at one point in 2023, Hoover tried to publish a coloring-book version of It Ends with Us—but Lively pushed it even further. In Instagram reels, she seemed to treat the film like a sort of visual bottomless brunch, urging women to “grab your friends” and “wear your florals” to watch a film that is almost exclusively about women being assaulted.
Nor was this a blip; she stocked out the film’s post-premiere party with cocktails made from her alcohol line, including one named “Ryle You Wait,” just in case anyone wanted to kick back with a drink named after the character they’d just seen trying to rape someone. Worse still, at least in the eyes of the Internet, Lively committed the heinous crime of being slightly condescending in interviews sometimes. And with that, a new villain was born.
But a woman such as Lively can withstand only so much damage, especially when it has real-world impact on her bottom line—including her Target hair-care range, which has reportedly suffered since the scandal first broke. And this is why, on December 21, The New York Times published “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” a 3,000-word report co-authored by Megan Twohey, the Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist whose work helped to take down Harvey Weinstein.
“We Can Bury Anyone” suggested that the criticism of Lively was something far more sinister: a deliberate smear campaign waged by Baldoni, who has described himself as a feminist, and his crisis-P.R. team, which was reportedly designed to tarnish Lively’s reputation while simultaneously hiding some of Baldoni’s alleged on-set transgressions.
According to the report, these included improvising unwanted kissing scenes, discussing his sex life, and entering her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed and breastfeeding. Furthermore, the film’s lead producer, Jamey Heath, is reported to have shown her a video of his wife naked.
The moment it dropped, Lively instantly became the object of overwhelming support everywhere. Relatives, friends, former co-stars and directors, SAG-AFTRA, and Hoover all put out statements vouching for her integrity. Meanwhile, Baldoni found himself nearly canceled. His agents at W.M.E. dropped him. An award was rescinded. His co-host left his podcast. It was the full Spacey.
At this point, the gloves came off entirely. On New Year’s Eve, Baldoni filed a $250 million lawsuit against The New York Times for libel. It’s a risky move—Puck’s Eriq Gardner claimed that Baldoni’s argument was merely “a different interpretation of the same facts” that were laid out in the New York Times piece—but nevertheless it did help to weaken Lively’s claims in the court of public opinion. (In a statement, the newspaper said: “We plan to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.... Our story was meticulously and responsibly reported. It was based on a review of thousands of pages of original documents, including the text messages and emails that we quote accurately and at length in the article.”)
Baldoni’s point-by-point rebuttal of the paper’s reporting states that he entered Lively’s makeup trailer only after she texted him an invitation. Additionally, the video that Heath shared with Lively was of his wife giving birth—and it was shown as the actress prepared for a scene in which her character delivered a baby of her own. Baldoni also alleges that he launched a smear campaign only because Lively had already started a smear campaign against him. On the same day, Lively sued Baldoni. At time of writing, it has been reported that Baldoni “absolutely” plans to sue her back.
Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s self-promoting lawyer, certainly seems game. On Wednesday, he appeared on the Megyn Kelly show, claiming that Reynolds mocked his client in his recent Deadpool & Wolverine film. (The man-bun-wearing character Nicepool, played by Reynolds, made an offensive comment about a woman’s postpartum body, but justified it by saying, “That’s O.K. I identify as a feminist.”)
And so now we’re left with a very expensive, very high-profile game of he said, she said, perhaps the biggest since Johnny Depp and Amber Heard used the courts to blast both of their careers to smithereens in 2022. This isn’t nearly as tawdry as that effort—we are, after all, watching the breakdown of a professional relationship rather than the violent end of a marriage—but it will nevertheless be a rubbernecker’s paradise.
Not least because it threatens to drag a wider industry circle into the mess. To handle his crisis P.R., Baldoni hired Melissa Nathan, who previously worked with Depp during his battle with Heard. Nathan’s sister Sara works for the New York Post, where she has been accused of planting anti-Lively stories. Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson, of all people, finds herself caught in the center of it; her ex-husband is now Blake Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, plus she’s set to direct a film that’s being produced by Baldoni.
And this will just get messier. All communication between Baldoni and Lively, along with their communications with each of their publicity teams, will be released as the process unfolds. And there, too, there is war—Stephanie Jones, Baldoni’s former publicist, is none too pleased with former employee Jennifer Abel, who was fired from her company and allegedly forced her out of representing Baldoni when his star was still on the rise.
None of the revelations will be a surprise, given the rate at which they are already leaking. On Monday, an e-mail was made public accusing Lively of using extortion to wrestle control of the film from Baldoni. Four days before that, someone on Reynolds’s team refuted a claim that he had screamed at Baldoni, telling TMZ that he was merely being “stern” and “impassioned.” It will be some time before the lawsuits reach the courts, and if this is the level of petty bickering we can expect until then, God help us all.
As far as Hollywood is concerned, perhaps the biggest crime here is that It Starts with Us—the novel’s sequel, not to mention the most pre-ordered book in the entire history of Simon & Schuster—is now unlikely to be made into a film. After all, Baldoni still owns the rights, and it’s almost unthinkable that he and Lively would want to re-unite after all this.
Smear campaigns might be one thing, but denying a studio a guaranteed payday? That’s unforgivable.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)
