Every Movie Based on a Wattpad Story, Ranked
Quick: What was Amazon Prime Video’s most popular original film worldwide in 2023? If you guessed Ben Affleck’s Air, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, or buzzed-about rom-com Red, White & Royal Blue, you’d be wrong. The top movie across all territories was the Spanish romantic drama My Fault, based on the novel by Mercedes Ron, which was originally published via online-fiction-portal Wattpad.
Critics and entertainment media paid almost no attention to My Fault (it has only seven reviews posted on Rotten Tomatoes), which is typical for the booming subgenre of movies based on Wattpad stories. Yet these films are often huge successes for streaming services like Prime Video and Netflix — the Kissing Booth and Through My Window movies have been reliable staples of Netflix’s top ten. They’re popular in theaters, too, especially in one-off presentations that maximize fan enthusiasm for movies like Beautiful Disaster and the After series.
As a self-publishing platform, Wattpad is known for hosting fan fiction and romance, and its authors and readers both skew heavily female. Those are genres and audiences that have been traditionally dismissed by critics and cinephiles; even their fans might admit that most Wattpad movies aren’t exactly high art. Their romances tend to be defined by toxic masculinity, indulging in fantasies of brooding, and sometimes violent men being drawn to unassuming, often overlooked women. The male characters are, typically, petulant narcissists with perpetual sneers who insult and cajole their female love interests into almost invariably unhealthy relationships. They use patronizing nicknames like Pigeon, Lucky, Moth, Freckles, Cheer, and Witch to refer to their intended paramours.
As problematic as these movies can be, they’re also deeply affecting for many fans. They represent a sort of freedom, an escapism that’s just as simplistic and just as valid as the masculine power trips of B-grade action movies. It’s often because of those toxic tropes and lazy narratives that Wattpad movies can be entertaining, and they deserve the same consideration as more supposedly sophisticated fare. Wattpad movies showcase big, messy emotions in a way that mainstream blockbusters have increasingly been running from. As big-budget movies become more and more sexless, Wattpad adaptations offer a valuable alternative outlet, even if they wildly overcorrect in the wrong direction.
With My Fault sequel Your Fault premiering this week on Prime Video, here’s a ranking of all the major Wattpad-based movies that have been released in the U.S., from the most obnoxious and harmful to the surprisingly pleasant and uplifting.
Beautiful Wedding (2024)
So many Wattpad movies take themselves so seriously that it’s tempting to wish for something campy and ridiculous instead of somber. But this sequel to Beautiful Disaster (from the novels by Jamie McGuire) represents a bit of a monkey’s paw situation, as writer-director Roger Kumble goes overboard with the strained wackiness, which undermines the central romance. Starting with a discount Hangover, as main characters Abby (Virginia Gardner) and Travis (Dylan Sprouse) wake up in Las Vegas with no memory of having gotten married, the movie shifts to Mexico, where they hide out from a nonthreatening crime lord (Rob Estes), engage in culturally insensitive tourist activities, and have sex accompanied by caveman noises and a literal cartoon-character representation of Travis’s growing erection.
Beautiful Disaster (2023)
Before their insufferable trip to Mexico, Abby and Travis have a meet-cute at their college’s underground fight club (naturally), after which Travis makes a bet that Abby will have to be his “roommate” for a month if he wins a fight (totally normal). She gives him an accidental hand job, barfs on him after they kiss, and accepts his criticism for showing too much cleavage. Later, he follows her to Las Vegas, where she has to use her skills as a poker prodigy to win $100,000 in a day to save her dad (a glum Brian Austin Green) from Estes’s mobster. The hyperactive, annoying movie lurches awkwardly between genres, but it’s marginally more tolerable than its sequel.
After Everything (2023)
The fifth and allegedly final movie in the After series struggles to extend the story beyond Anna Todd’s source novels, leaving out half of its central couple for most of its running time. Following his latest breakup with wide-eyed college student Tessa Young (Josephine Langford), pouty, short-tempered Hardin Scott (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) travels to Lisbon to make amends with a different woman whose life he essentially destroyed. Lovely Portuguese scenery aside, After Everything is a pathetic finale to the drawn-out franchise, bringing Tessa back for its last 20 minutes only to brush past the couple’s myriad issues on the way to a laughable ultrahappy ending.
After Ever Happy (2022)
While the title seems to indicate a conclusion, the fourth After movie ends with a “To be continued” title card, just like the previous movie did. In the meantime, Hardin writes his own book, titled After, about his relationship with Tessa, who’s not happy about it (although it can’t be worse than the hideous bangs on the wig Langford is stuck wearing). Hardin and Tessa continue to break up and get back together in every other scene. “Don’t quote Hemingway at me!” Tessa snipes in the middle of one of their many arguments about their competing past traumas. Also, Hardin burns down his mom’s house after he catches her cheating on her fiancé with the man he never knew was his biological father.
Your Fault (2024)
Both the crime-thriller elements and the sexual chemistry fall flat in the second installment of the Spanish series based on the novels by Mercedes Ron. Following a year of sneaking around together, stepsiblings Nick (Gabriel Guevara) and Noah (Nicole Wallace) get just one romantic montage before various half-baked subplots start tearing them in different directions. Director and co-writer Domingo González piles on the telenovela-style twists, including mysterious figures from the past, villainous doppelgängers, and a surprise paternity reveal. The potential new love interests for Nick and Noah are a waste of time, and the cluttered plot just peters out, barely even setting up the inevitable next installment. At least Noah gets to show off her French by referring to Nick’s penis as his “baguette.”
After We Collided (2020)
Although it features the sole appearance from Dylan Sprouse as Tessa’s co-worker Trevor, whose perceived romantic threat to Hardin has become a running joke with viewers, the second After movie is otherwise almost entirely filler. It takes place a month after the events of the first movie, as college freshman Tessa somehow scores a job at a major publishing company, and Hardin can’t handle knowing that she’s speaking to or even in the same room as other available men. Their constant easily resolved misunderstandings culminate with Tessa getting into a car accident that seems preferable to spending more time with Hardin.
After (2019)
The novel After famously began as Todd’s Harry Styles fan fiction, with Styles switched out for the fictional Hardin Scott when the book hit the mainstream. It’s an ode to peer pressure, as the sheltered Tessa leaves home for college, where she meets bad-boy Hardin, who berates her and then beds her after making a bet with his friends that he can take her virginity. Hardin is a parody of a rebel, with his leather jacket and muscle car, but there’s a freshness to the beginning of their love that’s lost in the later movies, and a sense of possibility that is repeatedly dashed by the mostly shoddier sequels.
After We Fell (2021)
The third After movie recasts nearly every character except Tessa and Hardin, and yet it’s somehow the best in the franchise, mostly thanks to director Castille Landon’s willingness to deliver on the steamy sex scenes. Tessa and Hardin are undeniably attractive, and seeing them get it on is really the only appeal. There’s a sex scene in a hot tub and another involving ice cubes, which may be clichés but at least bring some much-needed liveliness to the worn-out routine of Hardin’s seething jealousy and hair-trigger temper. Hardin even gets mad at Tessa for having sex with someone else in one of his nightmares — which Landon turns into another opportunity for welcome titillation.
Through My Window 3: Looking at You (2024)
What sets this Spanish trilogy apart is its unabashed embrace of explicit sexuality — more than any other movies on this list, the adaptations of Ariana Godoy’s novels live up to the Wattpad reputation as soft-core porn for teenagers. The third installment is disappointingly skimpy on those scenes compared to the first two, though, and it relies on cheap delaying tactics to prolong the separation between main characters Raquel Mendoza (Clara Galle) and Ares Hidalgo (Julio Peña) during the Christmas holidays. “Poor you — men are pigs,” Raquel’s boss says dismissively when she shirks her duties to wallow in misery over Ares, and that sums things up perfectly.
The Kissing Booth 3 (2021)
This hugely popular Netflix franchise, based on the novels by Beth Reekles, has a tough time maintaining its sunny teen-movie tone into the third and final installment, which invents a previously unmentioned list of crucial activities for best friends Elle Evans (Joey King) and Lee Flynn (Joel Courtney) to complete during the summer before they head off to college. Elle is still dating Lee’s sullen older brother, Noah (Jacob Elordi), and the characters’ codependency has lost whatever meager charms it might have had, as Elle and Lee grind through the hyperactive activities on their “beach bucket list.” Aside from a refreshingly unresolved ending (with a brief appearance from the titular apparatus), The Kissing Booth 3 is a desultory conclusion to a mostly upbeat series.
Through My Window: Across the Sea (2023)
The second Through My Window movie offers a glossy, sexy getaway, as Raquel and Ares spend the summer at Ares’s family’s extravagant beach house, along with family and friends who are seemingly all having sex with each other. The subplots about the supporting characters’ relationships are tedious, but it helps that everyone is glamorous and alluring — this is the kind of movie in which multiple characters own yachts. Ares’s younger brother gets to have a threesome, and there is a lot of suggestive ice-cream licking intercut with various sex scenes. Everything falls apart once overwrought tragedy strikes in the final act, and the characters’ angst is much less compelling than their all-consuming lust.
The Kissing Booth 2 (2020)
Elle’s primary concern in this sequel is whether to attend UC Berkeley with Lee or Harvard with Noah once she graduates from high school. It’s an unconvincing dilemma made even less believable by structuring the movie’s narration as Elle’s college-admissions essay, which would be unlikely to get her admitted even to a local safety school. With an unforgivable 131-minute running time, The Kissing Booth 2 drags out Elle’s meaningless temptation by hot new transfer student Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez), who serenades her on the beach by apparently pulling a guitar out of thin air. The movie culminates in a dance-video-game competition that is so far removed from reality that it’s kind of endearing, just like the movies themselves.
Perfect Addiction (2023)
With more training montages than a Rocky movie, this adaptation of the Claudia Tan novel from After series veteran Castille Landon makes an effort to structure its story around something beyond romance, but it’s a pretty underwhelming sports drama. At least Kayden (Ross Butler) is a more convincing MMA fighter than Dylan Sprouse’s Travis in the Beautiful movies, and main character Sienna (Kiana Madeira) is equally authentic as his trainer. She put her own fighting dreams on hold to train her dirtbag ex, and after she catches him cheating on her with her sister, she shifts her attention to his rival, Kayden. Their close proximity obviously leads to an attraction, and at one point, Landon combines training and sex in the same montage. Sienna’s athletic achievements are mostly sidelined until the very end, but even that minor ambition grants her more agency than the typical Wattpad protagonist.
Sidelined: The QB and Me (2024)
The romance between a high-school cheerleader and the star quarterback is pretty low-concept for Wattpad, and there’s not much at stake in this Tubi original movie based on the novel by Tay Marley. It’s harmless enough, though, like a handful of episodes of a mid-level CW drama strung together. James Van Der Beek even shows up, although now he’s playing the QB’s dad instead of the QB, and his son, Drayton (TikTok star Noah Beck), utters a variation on his iconic Varsity Blues line (“I don’t want your life!”). Drayton and serious-minded dancer Dallas (Siena Agudong) are so dull that they play beer pong with water because they have to get up early the next day, and their romantic trajectory is similarly peppy and inoffensive, with mild opposition on the way to a tidy resolution.
My Fault (2023)
“You’re my stepsister, and you’re 17,” rich layabout Nick feebly protests as he’s making out with Noah. “Then kiss me until I’m 18,” she responds. That’s the level of soap-opera tackiness in the first Fault movie, which is most effective as a sort of Gossip Girl by way of the Fast & Furious movies. Nick is a 22-year-old law student who engages in illegal street racing in his spare time, and he’s not happy when his dad gets remarried and saddles him with a teenage stepsister. Noah isn’t happy, either, but their short-lived antagonism soon gives way to passion. The movie’s clumsy turn into revenge-thriller territory is a bust, but the quasi-incestuous heat between the main characters keeps things moving.
Through My Window (2022)
The romance between neighbors Raquel and Ares begins when he hacks into her Wi-Fi and reads her protected files, which include the obsessive fan-fiction-style pieces she’s written about him. It’s not an auspicious start for either of them, but their sexual chemistry is so strong that their misguided behavior seems almost beside the point. Through My Window establishes director Marçal Forés’s dedication to graphic sex scenes with plenty of nudity, including a highly questionable first sexual encounter between Raquel and Ares while his underage brother lies sleeping in the bed next to them. For all their naughtiness, Wattpad movies are largely tame and regressive, and Through My Window is no exception, so its carnal openness provides a slight counterpoint to its sexist tone.
The Kissing Booth (2018)
The Kissing Booth movies have been so successful in part because they offer Disney Channel–level shenanigans with slightly raunchy undertones, much like the kissing booth itself. The first installment fits in relatively well with fellow teen-focused Netflix movies like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, although it’s more aggressively patriarchal in its depiction of Noah’s crude courtship of Elle. He softens a bit in the later movies, but he starts out as a hothead who attacks any boy who shows an interest in her, yet gives her the cold shoulder whenever she wants to get closer. Joey King and Jacob Elordi can be sweet together, though, and the main conceit of the high-school-carnival kissing booth, where characters can unwittingly express their secret desires, is a sturdier narrative setup than a lot of Wattpad movies manage.
The Tearsmith (2024)
This Italian adaptation of Erin Doom’s novel is part Wuthering Heights, part Charles Dickens, and part After, but the main thing that sets it apart is director Alessandro Genovesi’s sense of style. The gothic atmosphere carries this heightened, absurd story about a pair of orphans who are adopted from an ostentatiously strict facility by blandly loving parents who seem oblivious to the fact that teenagers Nica (Caterina Ferioli) and Rigel (Simone Baldasseroni) are having operatic sex under their roof. Rigel is like a combination between Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff and the title character of The Crow, and the ominous score and canted camera angles make him seem like a possible horror villain. Of course, he’s just misunderstood, and the movie leaps from its melodramatic courtroom climax to a rushed happy ending that even the florid visuals can’t compensate for.
Anonymously Yours (2021)
This Mexican teen rom-com is far more wholesome than other Wattpad movies, and as a result, it’s also much less grating. Scholarship student Alex (Ralf Morales) is still quite rude to classmate Vale (Annie Cabello) when they both end up in detention, but that doesn’t last long, and they seem to genuinely like each other as they start to spend more time together. They’re also caught in a You’ve Got Mail situation, texting each other anonymously after a wrong-number mix-up. The contrivances required for the characters not to figure out the true identities of their mysterious correspondents are a little much, but director and co-writer Maria Torres (working from Wendy Mora’s novel) applies a light touch to both the in-person romance and the textual courtship. It’s a fun, colorful movie about two young people finding themselves as they find each other.
Float (2023)
Thanks to its gentle tone, gorgeous Canadian landscapes, and likable characters who actually care about each other’s feelings, director and co-writer Sherren Lee’s loose adaptation of Kate Marchant’s novel is easily the best Wattpad movie. It’s still a predictable romance about a career-driven woman who escapes the city for a small town, where she falls in love with a salt-of-the-earth man, but Lee adds cultural specificity and often subverts genre expectations. Avoiding pressure from her Taiwanese immigrant parents, future doctor Waverly Liu (Andrea Bang) forgoes a prestigious fellowship to spend the months before her residency in an aggressively quaint Canadian town with her artist aunt. She meets and falls for hunky lifeguard Blake Hamilton (Robbie Amell), who’s raising his teenage sister after their parents’ death. Both characters deal honestly with their emotional baggage, and Bang and Amell make them easy to root for. It’s the least toxic relationship in the entire Wattpad cinematic canon.
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