Regretting You director: ‘I wanted Colleen Hoover to have a good experience on this one’

It’s only been just over a year since we last saw a Colleen Hoover adaptation in cinemas with It Ends With Us, but the prolific author has the second hitting screens this week, with a suitably buzzy cast.

This time it’s How to Train Your Dragon actor Mason Thames and Emmy nominee (and Hollywood’s hardest-working young star) McKenna Grace taking the leads, alongside Together’s Dave Franco and M3GAN and Girls’ Allison Williams.

Aside from these strong foundations, Regretting You has a proven romantic drama adaptations master in Josh Boone, who also directed the film version of The Fault in Our Stars.

He started off by making a soundtrack for his vision of Regretting You.

‘That’s really the first thing that I do, always, just to convince myself that I can make the movie. I was trying to find a tonal world the movie could live in,’ he explains.

This soundtrack includes bangers like the Killers’ When You Were Young and Dakota by The Stereophonics, which might cause some discomfort for any viewers in their early 30s and beyond as these songs signal flashbacks to the parental generation played by Franco, Williams, Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald.

When I joked to Grace and Thames that I felt personally victimised by the choice of tunes, she laughs and tactfully adds: ‘I mean, to be fair, I felt like Allison was too young to be playing my mother!’

It is, however, canon – Regretting You focuses on the love story between Thames’ Miller and Grace’s Clara, who is the daughter that Williams’ Morgan had as a teenager with her husband Chris (Scott Eastwood). When her family is plunged into personal tragedy, they have work out how to navigate life amid shocking revelations.

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Boone spent around 18 months developing the film version of the book – ‘I probably wrote 10 drafts of the script’ – but also allowed for a very collaborative process, where all the actors gave feedback before also rewriting dialogue together each day while shooting. The screenplay was credited to Susan McMartin.

Boone was attracted to it because of the ‘messy family relationships’ and coming-of-age aspect, similarities it shares with his previous films, including debut movie Stuck in Love.

He also knew ‘we could do an honest job adapting the book so that it could actually be the book’.

It’s clear in my conversations that for both the director and the actors, staying true to Hoover’s source novel was of tantamount importance, even if the best-selling author and BookTok sensation took a hands-off approach, with Boone confirming she ‘left them to it’.

One of Hoover’s favourite scenes can be seen in the trailer, where Williams pulls up her car alongside Grace and Thames to demand her daughter get out, but has actually pulled up too close for that to be possible – it’s something from the author’s own life.

‘We tried to get all those things right for her. And I didn’t need to talk to her, I knew if I honoured the book, she’d be happy, so I really thought of it in that way,’ he adds.

‘I just wanted her to have a good experience on this one.’

This seems a reference to the unexpectedly rocky time Hoover ended up having with the first of her films to make it to the big screen, mega-hit It Ends With Us last year.

Following backlash over some of the darker elements of the plot, which revolves around domestic abuse, appearing to be brushed aside during promotion of the movie, the strained professional relationship between its star Blake Lively and actor-director Justin Baldoni famously imploded.

She accused him of creating a hostile work environment and of mounting a smear campaign against her, which he denied, while he is now countersuing Lively and husband Ryan Reynolds after an increasingly messy and sprawling back-and-forth between lawyers and in the media. A court date for their trial is set for March 9, 2026.

Hoover herself initially put out a statement on social media supporting Lively and praising her as ‘nothing but honest, kind, supportive and patient since the day we met’, but by January 2025 had deactivated her Instagram account and distanced herself from the headline-grabbing fallout, which threatened to overshadow the film’s box office success, which is thought to have netted a profit of over $200million (£150.1m), according to Deadline.

This was a nightmare scenario for her first taste of Hollywood, but with Regretting You it’s clear everyone has worked hard to keep things smooth sailing and positive.

Thames and Grace insist that neither of them was aware Regretting You had been adapted from a book, least of all one of Hoover’s, when they first signed on.

‘We just read the script and loved the story and loved the filmmakers behind it. And I knew McKenna was involved, so I just wanted to do it because it was kind of a no-brainer. Then after I got the job, I read the book and fell in love with it and the characters,’ Thames says.

‘It inspired me to do right by the fans and bring Miller to life – and also just doing right by me, because I’m a fan as well,’ the 18-year-old actor, who tells me he has always wanted to make a romantic movie, says

‘I didn’t know, coming into it, about the book, but then once I signed on, I read the book a million times over and put notes in every margin of the book and highlighted it all over it and I was all in it,’ Grace, 19, shares enthusiastically.

Both stars have yet to meet Hoover, but Thames reveals he ‘got a very sweet message from her and that was awesome’, while Grace received ‘a very lovely note and a signed copy’.

Grace then remembers that ‘technically’ the writer did say something over Zoom before the cast table read, but they both feel like it didn’t count because they didn’t get the chance to speak to her.

‘We did see her. We know she’s out there somewhere! Wherever you are… I hope you like the movie,’ Grace laughs.

The duo has played around together on TikTok as part of the film’s marketing, enjoying the chance ‘to put fun things out there and see what people say’ in the BookTok community.

Director Boone takes the opposite approach, keeping a healthy distance from any potential feedback or demands from fans by quitting social media six or seven years ago – but like all good film people, ‘I have a Letterboxd account and that’s about it’.

‘It’s not that I don’t care,’ he explains, it’s actually quite the opposite. ‘I’m choosing books [where] I believe you can actually adapt the book, not do something different from the book. I have to believe that since all of us were fans of the book, the fans of the book will be happy.’

‘It’s my hope, but I can’t think about them that much because that’s not productive or helpful to what I’m trying to do,’ he points out. Fair enough.

He’s someone who’s made a name for himself in the genre, so I ask Boone what the secret ingredient is to success with romantic dramas and making book adaptations work.

As with The Fault in Our Stars, Boone reasons: ‘[It was] the right cast, the right story and I was able to bring what I can bring to things like this to hopefully boost it as a movie.’

Regretting You is released in US and UK cinemas on Friday, October 24.

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