Promoting an early screening as “Girls Night Out” and featuring an interactive pop-up in Tampa, Florida for one of the most anticipated movies of the year, It Ends With Us, is only one part of why the Colleen Hoover adapted movie performed so well at the box office this weekend. Despite going head-to-head with a video game adaptation and Deadpool & Wolverine, this dark romance movie held its weight at the theaters.
But it does underscore a shift in the currents of movie-making.
It Ends With Us Becomes a Massive Hit
Over the weekend, the $25 million film starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni with 84% female audience attendees grossed $50 million without premium-screen tickets or strong reviews. Even with many suggesting that the film could be front-loaded by Hoover’s mega-fans, the film is drawing huge crowds nearly a year after Barbie dominated the box office for nearly six weeks.
While the overall health of the box office has improved over the summer, there was something special about It Ends, even if the film’s subject matter came as a shock to those not familiar with the story.
The dark romance follows Lily Bloom (Lively) as she falls in love with the dark, mysterious neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni). Like most of Hoover’s books, the story follows two characters who have their traumas to face and overcome. Unfortunately, this romance ends with domestic abuse and Lily finding comfort in her first love, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar).
With 8 million copies sold, It Ends takes the taboo central premise about the insidious nature of domestic abuse and mashes it with a trope-heavy and often absurd love-triangle romance. Sure, the turn the story takes could catch many off guard, but that is what makes the stories Hoover writes outsell the Bible.
Read More: 101 Romance Story Prompts
Romance Has and Will Always Be Popular
The success of It Ends With Us has surprised many, you must step back and recognize that romance remains a powerhouse genre. In 2024 alone, The Idea of You, Anyone but You, and A Family Affair are some of the biggest movies of the year. While streaming services let two of these movies waste away after they performed well for a few weeks, Anyone but You emerged as the first notable rom-com in years, grossing $219.2 million.
Don’t even get me started on how Bridgerton succeeded
From The May Irwin Kiss, the first known romantic film ever, to Titanic, which held the title for highest-grossing film ever, to the modern adaptations of romantic stories that held onto BookTok’s short attention span, romance is a genre that can never die.
Why We Fall for Romance Movies
People often dub romance movies as flawed but fun, but I would argue that most movies are meant to be “fun” or, at least, entertaining. Evoking powerful emotions and transporting audiences into a world where we pine for romance is the genre’s strength, using the tropes to suck us into the tension created by the themes of passion, intimacy, and emotional connection.
Although we may never have been involved in a love triangle or courted by a duke, these stories evoke strong emotions from our universal feelings.
The genre, which often dips into the “women’s pictures” genre, showed Hollywood’s greatest actresses overcoming the ever-present social norms that suffocated women in real life as they fell in love. People want to see leads overcoming struggles that they are often silently resilient about, even the simplest ideas like a transformative journey from naïve childhood to adult independence, as a romantic partner sees them for who they are and accepts them.
‘It Ends With Us’ (2024)
The Not-So-Romantic Reality
Many people roll their eyes at romance movies, noting them as cheesy, poorly-written projects aimed at a very small demographic of audience goers, women between ages 18 and 34. For the last decade or so, this was true.
Romance movies tend to follow established genre tropes to a T, making the audience lose interest the moment they spot the tell-tale road makers of where the story is going. Sure, it’s a bit cynical to predict the death of romance movies in theaters, but it’s true. Predictability is what killed the superhero movie.
Another aspect of the not-so-romantic death of the genre is that the stories were simply out of touch with reality. While the characters can be as out of touch as they want—owning a successful flower shop in 2021, trying to lose a guy in 10 days, or pretending to date a guy at a wedding to make your ex-jealous—the story that is pushing the romance forward doesn’t match the modern experience of love.
Finding love is hard. It is awkward, complicated, and embarrassingly vulnerable. Movies just haven’t been able to find the sweet spot between the romantic fantasy and the hard reality that exists outside of that bubble, threatening to pop it.
Romance was deemed safer on streaming services, inside its bubble protected from reality. But something has changed.
Read More: The 9 Elements of All Great Rom-Coms
‘It Ends With Us’ (2024)
It Ends With Us Ushers In a New Era of Romance
Whether or not you enjoy Hoover’s novel, you can’t deny that It Ends and other New Adult romance books sweeping BookTok have the potential to be adapted for the big screen or inspire an original romance story in the modern era.
Currently, Emily Henry, Sarah J. Mass, and Hoover—the biggest romance authors right now—have adaptations in pre-production. The fan base for these stories is ravenous to see these romance stories brought to the screen because the romantic tension is just that good. When that tension is released, often with a passionate kiss, the crowd can’t help but feel a little giddy.
But romance is more than the tension that builds between characters.
Romance declined because writers leaned too heavily on tropes. While tropes exist for a reason, stakes have to be established to make the audience feel invested in the success or failure of the romance. It Ends takes these stakes to a shocking place of domestic violence, but the stakes can be embarrassment or the threat of a career opportunity being taken away. These stakes can be reality low, but they have the power to fundamentally change the protagonist that we’ve come to love.
The excitement for audiences comes from the unknown—where a story might go or how a relationship can flourish despite a haunting past that slowly gets revealed. By using the tropes to help establish the stakes of the story, you can take your romance story in so many directions to pull on the heartstrings of the audience. Just remember that happy endings are greatly appreciated.
Read More: How To Create Engaging Romance In Movies
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The post What ‘It Ends With Us’ Does Differently from Most Modern Romance Films appeared first on ScreenCraft.
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Author: Alyssa Miller
