‘It Ends with Us’ Looks Like A Blake Lively Box Office Hit — Rewarding Her For Focusing On Star Vehicles Over Franchise Fare

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds met on the set on Green Lantern, which makes their decade-plus of marriage by far the most successful thing that resulted from that particular film shoot. It was a pivotal film for both of them, though probably not in the way either envisioned, in terms of either their future relationship or their respective film careers. If the movie had been a hit, it would have become a franchise for both performers – a sequel was still being discussed months after it soft-flopped at the box office – and Reynolds’ years-long quest for a comic book movie to call his own would have finally ended. Lively, meanwhile, was close to the end of her run on Gossip Girl, and while making Green Lantern sequels might not have become her primary concern, it certainly would have made for an easy transition into a regular big-screen gig.  

Instead, the stars went opposite ways in their careers, if not in life. While Reynolds made a few grown-up movies in the wake of Green Lantern – Mississippi Grind from 2015 features one of his best performances – he still sought greater blockbuster stardom, and finally found it by reviving Deadpool, the character he played briefly in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Since then, even his non-Deadpool movies have felt like aggressive brand management.

Lively, on the other hand, either took the failure of Green Lantern as a message, or used it as the perfect excuse; either way, she has opted out of franchise fare for the past thirteen years. Her vocal cameo as Lady Deadpool in her husband’s magnum opus Deadpool & Wolverine is the first sequel she’s touched since The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Perhaps more remarkably, she hasn’t circled back to TV, either. Instead, she has made a run of relatively old-fashioned star vehicles: a fantasy romance (The Age of Adaline), a survival thriller (The Shallows), a comic mystery (A Simple Favor), and a spy picture (The Rhythm Section), among others. None of them have a basic premise that would seem wildly out of place in a movie from 1958. (Well, maybe The Shallows, but only because that would put it pre-Jaws.) Now she’s poised for a his-and-hers box office photo; the top two movies at this weekend’s box office are likely to be Deadpool & Wolverine and her latest, It Ends with Us.

It Ends with Us falls right into Lively’s old-fashioned wheelhouse, though it also probably counts as her closest flirtation yet with franchising and brands. The film stands alone as what they used to call a women’s picture, following Lily Bloom (Lively), as she feels increasingly torn between her first love and her volatile new husband, with an overlay of social-issue seriousness because Lily’s supposed dream spouse Ryle (Justin Baldoni, who also directed) turns out to be a domestic abuser. But It Ends with Us is also based on a bestselling novel by Colleen Hoover, who’s become her own massive brand name – a sequel book already exists – and (presuming some fidelity to the source material) has the movie speaking in the cutesy peculiarities of undemanding mainstream fiction, romance-adjacent enough to make every relationship in the film feel like a painful contrivance. If any of the details feel too difficult to believe, the author will just have the characters make an even-cutesier joke about, how, say, parents with the last name Bloom really did name their daughter Lily, and now she wants to open a flower shop. It’s really the movie that’s so dopily literal-minded. To show Lily’s complicated feelings about her recently deceased (and abusive) father, the movie has her mom ask Lily to construct a eulogy based on five things she loved about him – and she responds by jotting down the numbers one through five on a napkin, then leaving them in blank, wrinkled anguish. It doesn’t count as visual shorthand if it involves such conspicuously odd behavior.

It’s in her mourning period that Lily meets Ryle, who coincidentally turns out to be the brother of Allysa (Jenny Slate), Lily’s new best friend and employee. That family hides a tragic secret, matching the abuse in Lily’s family, which in turn is why she formed such a close bond in her teenage years with Atlas (Alex Neustaedter and, as an adult, Brandon Sklenar) – Atlas had an abusive father, too. All of the coincidences and parallels are supposed to form a bigger picture of the cycle Lily is determined to break in her own life. Instead, they make the movie feel insular and phony – one of those stories where years can pass like the flip of a page, secure in the knowledge that Lily won’t actually be doing anything in those spaces between.

Lively has a natural glamor, so the added glossiness of It Ends with Us only makes her feel more remote, pointing her starry glow in the wrong direction. Some of her best film work trades on her slightly opaque qualities, assigning her characters with slippery, shifting identities. It’s most prominent and textual in the disappearing wife and mother of A Simple Favor; it’s also there in the girl-turned-assassin of The Rhythm Section, and the blind woman regaining her sight (and developing some unforeseen kinks along the way) in the relative obscurity All I See Is You. In It Ends with Us, it’s Lily’s perception of her husband that changes, rather than her essential sense of self. This isn’t an unworthy subject, yet this treatment of it turns Lively into a fairly standard beacon of strength and potential uplift; breaking the cycle of abuse is ultimately as direct and clear-cut as the decision to open a bespoke flower shop. (In reality, both are probably vastly harder than this movie lets on.)

In the meantime, Lively shows off a variety of fashions: a vast head of curls for one scene, matched to a costume party whose theme I didn’t quite catch; pajama-like button-downs paired with midriff-baring halter tops; an endless supply of oversized coats. Many of her other movies have this look-book appeal; she would have had a field day in that mid-movie fashion show from 1939’s The Women. It goes a long way toward creating a movie-star vibe. It’s a shame, then, that It Ends with Us feels so prepackaged and orderly; Lively’s outfits are the most, well, lively thing about it. Contrary to its romantic instincts, the movie makes a spectacle out of Ryle’s worst outbursts, capturing them in longer takes than other scenes. It goes a little way towards making them harrowing, and winds up making the rest of the movie look all the more like an ad for medication. This is Lively’s least stylish, most staid picture in years.

It may also become her biggest-ever hit. (In pure dollars, the movie it has to beat is actually still Green Lantern. In goodwill, though, it’s surely A Simple Favor, which is getting a sequel soon.) The best possible outcome wouldn’t be filming the sequel novel, but taking this movie’s success as a validation of her playing the long game and refusing to surrender the idea of making movies for grown-ups, or at least aspiring grown-ups, while Reynolds has tried to see the R-rated Deadpool & Wolverine as “four-quadrant.” Don’t be surprised if, 10 or 20 years down the line, Lively’s filmography lingers longer than her husband’s.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.