A fresh casting announcement has absolutely thrilled fans and convinced me that the film in question could end up as one of the most popular and anticipated movies in years.
It could also signal the early era of another rom-com giant, à la Richard Curtis, or the coming of a film about love with the power to impact pop culture like When Harry Met Sally or 10 Things I Hate About You.
I am, of course, talking about the announcement via Deadline of Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman to play the romantic leads in the movie adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s best-selling novel (and – I cannot stress this enough – actual BookTok sensation) The Love Hypothesis.
For those who haven’t been wrapped up in the quite astounding way TikTok has revived the publishing industry since lockdown, even garnering its own name for that corner of the social site, The Love Hypothesis was one of the platform’s biggest breakout successes following the novel’s formal publication in 2021.
But what has now shifted this film up a notch in terms of anticipation is how the casting has seemingly leaned into the famous early inspirations of Hazelwood’s book.
And it’s this which makes me confident everyone’s obsession is about to go stratospheric.
The Love Hypothesis follows PhD student Olive Smith (Reinhart), a rising star in Stanford University’s biology department, who ends up in a classic fake dating situation with a hotshot professor, Adam Carlsen (Bateman).
Everything kicks off when she does the totally normal thing of panic kissing him at the lab to convince her best friend she has a boyfriend. And he does the totally normal thing of agreeing afterwards to maintain the lie for… reasons.
However, The Love Hypothesis actually began in 2018 as Head Over Feet, a piece of Star Wars fan fiction published online by Hazelwood, which was inspired by the ‘Reylo’ shipping many fans did between the characters of Rey (Daisy Ridley) and antagonist Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).
This is a romance that actually almost bore fruit in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker – and it’s one that now has another fascinating link to The Love Hypothesis, for Bateman in the role of Adam is Rey actress Ridley’s husband in real life.
Although some were holding out for Driver to take on the role his character inspired, many are tickled pink by this meta casting move – ‘I’m cackling’ posts are littered across social media – whether it was deliberate or not.
‘The concept of playing the love interest in fan fiction about your wife is kind of insane, I think Tom Bateman won in life,’ tweeted Alysa, while @rejectedcarebear wrote on Reddit: ‘This is actually the best part of the entire movie.’
‘They had a chance and they took it for sure haha!’ added another fan, while @pertifty shared: ‘I love this timeline we are living. I wonder why she didn’t want to play Olive if her husband is playing Adam??’ (As many then explained, there is such a thing as too on the nose.)
The excitement alone that’s been drummed up by the casting announcement of two semi well-known actors – Reinhart made her name on Riverdale and Bateman appeared in Da Vinci’s Demons as well as Sir Kenneth Branagh’s star-studded Murder on the Orient Express – confirms this is a watershed moment for TikTok and cinema.
Because now we’ve gone from mild interest that this adaptation is happening to fully seated for it. And Reinhart is a canny operator, fueling fan excitement with lots of fun posts about the film on – where else – but TikTok.
Yes, there have been popular BookTok adaptations previously, such as Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue and Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You. Both, co-incidentally, star Nicholas Galitzine and were made for Amazon’s streaming service Prime Video.
The Love Hypothesis is going a step further, being produced by Amazon MGM Studios. This suggests the company’s confidence in the movie’s cinematic success but also means its streaming home will likely end up being Prime Video too. Could this company be the next rom-com powerhouse, snapping up the major romance book titles that capture the zeitgeist?
And let’s not beat around the bush, The Love Hypothesis will be bigger than those previous films anyway because it’s hornier – don’t let the cartoon humans on the book’s front cover fool you, Hazelwood likes a lot of detail in her sex scenes. Many audience members will be pulled in simply by curiosity over how that might look onscreen; let’s call it the Fifty Shades of Grey factor.
If The Love Hypothesis does well, there’s also several other Hazelwood novels ripe for adaption – from Love on the Brain to Problematic Summer Romance and Deep End (for the uninitiated, that one will truly have you blushing).
Hazelwood, a real-life former neuroscience professor has made a name for herself as a ‘STEMinist’ author thanks to her female characters often being in science and tech fields and academia, drawing upon her own experience.
She’s also an expert at the genre’s tropes of pining and misunderstandings but puts them in modern workplace settings. This could easily be what the next wave of rom-coms looks like if they’re inspired or directly drawn from the pen of Hazelwood.
We’d be moving on from Richard Curtis’s bumbling, British and sweary romances to Hazelwood’s quirky, introverted and often American heroines.
And I think the world of onscreen rom-coms is more than ready to embrace The Love Hypothesis as the start of its next phase.
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