The Stans Won the Summer Box Office

This summer’s foul-mouthed, self-referential Deadpool & Wolverine, the latest overly self-aware Marvel movie and Disney’s blockbuster tentpole of the season, reigned for almost two weeks at the box office, amassing over a billion dollars in global ticket sales. The film toppled M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, blew Twisters out of Imax, and the less said about Borderlands, the better. The threequel really had it good for a while — critics were satisfied enough, D23 liked it, a guy in front of me on line for Trap told his friend he had to see Deadpool & Wolverine because it’s “so stupid, it’s awesome” — until August 9, when Justin Baldoni’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us starring Reynolds’s wife, Blake Lively, overtook it’s No. 1 spot.

The third Deadpool movie did make a brief comeback thereafter (and it’s gone on to become the top-grossing R-rated movie of all time), but It Ends With Us returned to the top just before Alien: Romulus’s opening. In fact, Baldoni’s movie nearly crossed the $180 million mark after its second weekend in theaters — a coup for a romance movie that tackles domestic violence up against the seventh installment in the Alien franchise and a superhero movie starring one of the world’s most relentlessly famous people. It Ends With Us is IP, too, but it’s an adaptation of a popular novel whose author’s work had yet to be adapted elsewhere. And though Lively, also famous, has been at the helm of the film’s promotion, she’s by no means a frequent movie star (it’s been four years since the release of the rightfully underseen The Rhythm Section), and her co-stars Baldoni and Brandon Sklenar aren’t exactly marquee icons.

It Ends With Us does have one thing going for it, though. Hoover’s fans — who call themselves CoHorts and praise her willingness to write about abusive relationships — may not have the numbers that, say, the Deadpool and/or Wolverine fandoms have, but they’re nothing to write off. A private Facebook group called “Colleen Hoover’s CoHorts,” a community that connects fans with Hoover herself, boasts over 200,000 members. The Reddit community /r/ColleenHoover has 17,000 members. A GoodReads group called “CoHorts” has more than 13,000 members. It’s hard to know where to begin to measure the reach of #BookTok, the sub-community that launched Hoover’s work into the stratosphere and subsequently turned on her for romanticizing abusive relationships and releasing color books. No matter, its members are still going to the theater. “I’m going because CoHo kinda got me into reading,” says one TikTok user, “I do not support her … but I still wanna go.”

And then there’s the shoot drama. Shortly before the film’s premiere, rumors of behind-the-scenes feuding between Baldoni and Lively surfaced. (TMZ’s anonymous sources claimed Lively felt fat-shamed on set and that Baldoni lingered a little too long on their kissing scenes; The Hollywood Reporter’s anonymous sources say the rift was during postproduction, when Lively may or may not have commissioned a competing cut of the movie Baldoni directed.) For a while, it seemed like Lively and her co-star allies were doing a graceful job avoiding speaking negatively about Baldoni by avoiding speaking about him at all. Then it seemed like Baldoni was actually winning over the public with his own modesty campaign; he, too, avoided saying anything bad about the other side, though he was clearly not invited to their media spots. And then the CoHorts descended, accusing the entire cast of being a little too glib in suggesting fans “grab your drinks, wear your florals” and head on out to the cineplex to see a movie depicting abuse.

In the case of Baldoni vs. Lively, no one really loses (see again: nearly $180 million at the box office), but only the stans truly win. These are readers who come to It Ends With Us for its serious subject matter but stay for the juvenile, gossipy tone in which Hoover writes (like a person you don’t know at a party is telling you a crazy story about another person you don’t know). Her steamy romance novels have soap-opera sensibilities, and so her fans act accordingly, loving the books until they hate them until they love them again. And now there’s a film, with baffling aesthetic choices and an allegedly lurid backstory. The quality of the movie matters little to those compelled to see if they can see where all the real-life drama bleeds onto the screen, and whether or not the characters in the film dress like the characters people pictured in their heads. Which reminds me: Another friend of mine — who rarely, if ever, sees comic-book movies — confessed interest in Deadpool & Wolverine because he wanted to see Wolverine’s new throwback suit. These projects really were meant to be.