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What was once old is completely anew at the box office with the booming success of Sony and Wayfarer Studios’ It Ends With Us which opened to a surprising $50M this weekend.
Nobody saw this coming weeks ago, the pic arriving on tracking to around $15M, and it was only evident in the final run-up this week that this Blake Lively starring and produced, Justin Baldoni starring and directed title would pop to somewhere north of $40M+; which makes perfect sense given how movies, particularly those aimed at women, are marketed in the final run-up to their opening to stoke the fanbase.
Young female moviegoers per studio marketing suits make their decisions at the last minute, and they head to cinemas in packs when there’s an event for them to see. It Ends With Us pulled in the under 35 demo at 68% with women snapping up tickets at 84%. Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak also shows that 60% of those who watched It Ends With Us bought their tickets same-day.
A popular novel piece of female lit hitting the screen of course isn’t novel, it’s just that the sub-genre post Fifty Shades of Grey has jettisoned largely to streaming. However, what this weekend proves is that the perfect alignment of star, IP and sheer dating can still attract an underserved moviegoing audience out the house. Thirty percent told PostTrak they came because of Lively, while another 30% said it was because of the subject matter, that being a book.
Sony, in the wake of such post Covid successes as the Sydney Sweeney-Glen Powell romcom Anyone But You and the summer 2022 sleeper Where the Crawdads Sing has fooled the town again, proving there’s a continued appetite for old school genres, in this case the romance drama.
It Ends With Us isn’t the most bubbly of stories, dealing with the subject of domestic abuse. At the aorta of this movie’s successes is Hoover’s fevered fan following on BookTok with over 2 billion views on her TikTok hashtag. The novel was published by Atria Books in August 2016, and by 2019 had sold over 1M copies around the globe. However, It Ends With Us experienced a huge boom thanks to TikTok during the pandemic, and by 2022 was the top selling print book, with a 135-week run on the New York Times Bestseller List by the end of 2023.
Wayfarer Studios nabbed the rights to the novel, hence the co-financing deal with Sony, with Baldoni and Lively working close with Hoover to translate the book to screen, the author serving as EP.
Lively, we hear, as a producer and motion picture marketing guru was “a creative tour de force” in making sure that the movie didn’t wind up like a Hallmark movie simply boiling down to its domestic abuse theme. No wonder Baldoni exclaimed in an EW interview that when it comes to a sequel of It Ends With Us, “I think Blake Lively’s ready to direct.”
For the Gossip Girl alum, It Ends With Us was about so much more, about love lost and found, and the multifaceted aspects of a woman’s relationship with an empowered man. Lively rolled up her sleeves, not just for rewrites, but also was involved in editing the movie, all aspects of the pic’s marketing, directing the social media campaign and jumping into all aspects of it, down to a curated BTS Playlist and the It Ends With Us Spotify Shelf.
I understand Lively wasn’t wowed by the trailer’s first cut, and even became involved in editing it. Sony executives concurred that Lively’s instincts for the trailer were correct all along. Key to the spot was the use of the Taylor Swift song “My Tears Ricochet,” which I understand Lively secured from her pop singer best friend. For some rival movie marketing execs, it’s the use of Swift alone that made the difference in separating It Ends With Us from the noisy summer herd.
Sony launched the first trailer at a garden party on the Culver City lot with #BookTok and Bookstagram followed by a Q&A with Hoover and Baldoni. The first trailer racked up 128.1M views in its first 24-hours, becoming the biggest female event movie trailer in recent years, surpassing views for such pics as Wicked – Part 1 (112.9M views), Barbie (101.6M views), Taylor Swift: Eras Tour (96.2M views) and The Marvels (90.6M views). The It Ends With Us trailer went on to generate 319M views.
But above all, one can’t discount the date that Sony chose to release the movie, for here’s a movie built wisely off the heat of the year’s biggest film to-date, the billion-grossing Deadpool & Wolverine. Originally the Baldoni directed title was scheduled to open on Feb. 9 this year, then June 21 before being moved into the two-week wake of Deadpool & Wolverine. It was a genius stroke by Sony distribution and marketing, that allowed Lively to blitzkrieg promote It Ends With Us during the perfect storm of Deadpool & Wolverine‘s press tour; the actress playing a key, yet secret, role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie.
This permitted the clever stunt of having Ryan Reynolds, his mom, and Hugh Jackman ultimately and hysterically junket bomb the It Ends With Us presser; this Instagram posting near 1M likes.
What was also fueled here between Deadpool & Wolverine and It Ends With Us was the first husband-and-wife-star box office battle since late summer 1990 when Bruce Willis had Die Hard 2 and Demi Moore had Ghost. Lively commands close to 50M followers on social media to Reynolds’ 128M-plus followers. Social media analytics corp RelishMix reported that It Ends With Us pulled in 337.4M followers across TikTok, Facebook, X, YouTube and Instagram which is “2.5x over romantic drama and romantic comedy norms and fueled by sprinkles of Ryan Reynolds’ social machine with Blake Lively’s fans and certainly by Colleen Hoover’s 4.3M fanbase.”
The social media chatter was electric before Friday. “Convo on It Ends With Us runs positive as fans express excitement, emotional engagement and appreciation for an adaptation of the beloved novel. Chatter notes, ‘It makes me cry to see the characters, I had imagined while reading come true.’ Not only are fans ‘beyond excited’ for Blake Lively’s performance, but the set design has blown expectations away. ‘Chills! I got chills! I wasn’t expecting this, The shop looks perfect.’” reports RelishMix.
Also, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and the behind-the-scenes drama, which came out at the last minute before It Ends With Us‘ opening, certainly didn’t hurt this weekend’s ticket sales. Apparently, Baldoni and Lively didn’t see eye-to-eye during postproduction, with the former not participating in the press junket, skipping cast photos at the NYC premiere, and Lively not following him on social. All of this just takes the movie’s promo machine to a meta level, for just like their on-screen personas, Lively and Baldoni have their own friction. Some have likened the off-screen melodrama here with It Ends With Us to that of Don’t Worry Darling‘s toxic environment. Arguably, that movie was its own beast with Oliva Wilde’s “Miss Flo” video leaking, the filmmaker’s back-and-forth with original castmember Shia LaBeouf and Harry Styles’ spit-gate at the Venice Film Festival with Chris Pine.
Taking the press tour for It Ends With Us to another level was Hoover and Lively hitting the Book Bonanza book fair in Dallas back in June at which the duo did a Q&A before 2,000 attendees. Lively surprised the audience with a screening of the film.
There were also several content shoots with Lively, Hoover, Baldoni, and Brandon Sklenar leaning into different aspects of the book (flowers, hot cocoa cookies, crafts like putting flower patches on jeans) as well as direct-to-camera content (speaking directly to fans and newbies) in addition to behind-the-scenes bits on social.
The multi-prong social media pushed included stunts like bringing the flower shop owned by Lively’s character Lily Bloom to life at the Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles. The recreation was open for a month with several attendees lining up. The venue was used as an influencer content generator and backdrop, and an event space for press and tastemakers. The flower shop became an after screening destination after BookTok and Bookstagram screenings of the film. Sony also teamed with Meta’s Instagram and Threads book division to host a livestreamed Q&A on their @creators pages (18M followers) with Lively and Hoover along with a screening of the pic to fans.
The studio also partnered to bring Lily Bloom’s tiny flower to life through a custom piece featuring Lively in a Tiny Talk series:
Not all book readers are moviegoers, and Sony reached the non-frequent moviegoers across key platforms like Amazon, Goodreads, TikTok, Meta, YouTube, and Hudson airport bookstores.
Leaning into the character of Lily and her artistic nature, Sony tapped into relevant social communities commissioning artists to collaborate with the It Ends With Us channels and talent to create unique themed content centering around woodburning, sculpting, painting portraits, flowerpot designs, cakes, hot chocolate cookies, dressmaking and even woodworking.
This sculpting of a planter of Bloom’s flower shop racked up north of 2M views:
…while Tinkeke Younger baked with Lively and Sklenar, a clip which clocked 4.6M views.
Also becoming a thing on social was floral arranging, in addition to dressing up ala Lively’s character in floral dresses and patchwork jeans.
Below are influencers wearing their florals:
It’s not unheard of to hear about a star like Lively’s intimate involvement in the beats of a movie’s bespoke campaign. Tom Cruise routinely is across and has huge input in his movies’ promotions, while Reynolds is an integral component in Deadpool‘s marketing machine; the actor’s studio and digital marketing agency Maximum Effort involved heavily in curating Deadpool & Wolverine‘s roster of promotional partners.
Beamed one studio insider about Lively’s detailed touches with the pic’s campaign, “I wish she worked for us full-time.”