After taking #BookTok by storm and reigning as the number one best-selling novel of 2022 and 2023—even outperforming the Bible— It Ends With Us has finally arrived on the big screen. Based on Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel, the movie follows oh-so-conveniently-named flower shop owner Lily Blossom Bloom (played by Blake Lively) as she falls for charming but controlling neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who also directs)—just as her childhood love, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), reenters her life after years of estrangement. Like Hoover’s book, the film version of It Ends With Us delves into how patterns of physical abuse from Lily’s childhood , when her father (Kevin McKidd) assaulted her mother (Amy Morton), get repeated in her own romantic relationships as an adult.
Hoover previously told Today ’s Jenna Bush Hager that she partly based her most popular book off the violence that her mother faced. “One of my earliest memories was him throwing a TV at her,” she said of her biological father. “There were no resources for women to leave situations like that.
” Hoover said that her mother divorced her father when she was two. “She was able to get out of that relationship. And then from then on, I just remember growing up with a mother who was so strong and independent.
” Despite the embrace of It Ends With Us, the book has also drawn extensive backlash from those who believe that it romanticises domestic violence. The first portion of the narrativ.