By: Sophie Elmstrom & Lily Sheldon

‘It Ends with Us’ came out on August 9, 2024. This movie was based on the 2016 novel by Colleen Hoover, and the film was directed by Justin Baldoni. The film stars Jason Baldoni, Blake Lively, Jenny Slate, and Hasan Minhaj. The movie received mixed reviews, but it was a box office success, grossing 346.4 million worldwide against a production budget of 25 million. We wanted to give our thoughts on this movie, and compare it to the reviews of others.

Here’s a quick rundown of the movie. Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) moves to Boston to pursue her dream of opening her own business after the passing of her father. In Boston, she meets neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid, and they start to fall in love. As their relationship develops, Ryle starts to remind Lily of her parents’ relationship and the abusive tendencies of her father. Lily is at a dinner with Ryle, when she discovers that her high school sweetheart, Atlas, is the owner of the restaurant. Old feelings for Atlas begin to bubble up again, and Lily is stuck with an impossible choice to choose between Atlas and Ryle. Ryle hears about Atlas, and becomes enraged and jealous. He takes out his anger on Lily in forms of domesticated abuse. Lily reveals to Ryle about her father’s abuse to her mother and Lily escapes Ryle, and seeks out Atlas for help. She discovers she is pregnant, and moves out and lives with Atlas for a little. Lily asks for a divorce from Ryle, and he agrees after she asks Ryle how their daughter would react if she was abused by her partner. Lily hopes she has ended the cycle of abuse in her family, telling her daughter “It ends with Us”.

The movie also has a series of flashbacks where we go back in time to when Lily was in high school. One day, Lily is looking out her window and sees a boy her age coming out of the abandoned house next door. As she is walking to her bus she sees him at the stop as well. This sparks Lily to leave supplies at the door of this house in hope of helping this man out. Lily and this boy start talking to each other and Lily finds out his name is Atlas. These two end up falling in love with each other when suddenly Atlas moves away and they don’t continue to talk.

This movie received a 6.5/10 from IMDB and a 57% from Rotten Tomatoes. We believe that this ranking is just a little too low; we think this movie deserves an 8/10. Many reviews agree with the rating of 6.5/10, they believe that the story is very flat and not interesting. Many disagree with what we believed about how it is similar to the book, they said that it missed many book details.

As individuals who have read this book, we believe that movie did a very good job at portraying these characters and the story. Although there are controversies with this movie we believe that the movie was very good and interesting. The way that they portrayed Ryles’ character was very similar and the casting was very good in our opinion.

Overall, we believe that this movie deserves a 7/10 because although it wasn’t a perfect movie it was a very good book adaptation.

You can watch this movie on Prime Video.