If you’ve followed Blake Lively’s efforts to promote her new film, “It Ends With Us,” you’d think the movie is a woman’s bubbly, “Barbie”-like journey of self-discovery as she has to choose between two hot guys, enjoys girl-power bonding and dons great clothes — though florals instead of Barbiecore pink.
Lively’s social media posts, morning show interviews and red-carpet appearances in various designer gowns wouldn’t prepare you for the fact that “It Ends With Us” actually tells the story of a a beautiful florist shop owner (Lively), who impulsively marries a dashing neurosurgeon who turns out to be abusive.
“It Ends With Us,” based on Colleen Hoover’s best-selling “dark romance,” has soared at the box office, earning $50 million its opening weekend. But Lively’s Instagram has been inundated with hundreds of angry comments from followers, aghast at her “tone-deaf” choice to essentially airbrush the film’s serous domestic violence themes out of the film’s promotional efforts. People have accused the “Gossip Girl” star — a producer on the film, along with her husband Ryan Reynolds — of misleading audiences and of disrespecting the suffering of domestic violence survivors for the sake of a “Barbie-like” marketing campaign to spur box office.
Canadian-US actor Ryan Reynolds and his wife US actress Blake Lively attend the New York premiere of “It Ends With Us” at at AMC Lincoln Square in New York, August 6, 2024. (Photo by Charly TRIBALLEAU / AFP) (Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)
But really, no one should be surprised that the actor, fashion “icon” and internet entrepreneur is being called out for being oblivious to the dark context of one of her romps through fashion and lifestyle branding. This sort of thing has happened before with Lively — at least twice, starting with her and Reynolds infamously getting married in 2012 on a Southern plantation with a history of slavery.
On Tuesday, Lively, somewhat defensively, tried to clean up the “It Ends With Us” mess by going on Instagram Story to share the number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. She also insisted that she has talked about the movie’s domestic violence storyline in interviews but believes that the movie is about so much more — “a story of the female experience” and “the multitudes we hold.” Meanwhile, the drama swirling around “It Ends With Us” includes reports of a feud between Lively and the film’s director and co-star, Justin Baldini, who some fans note, has been “the only one” on the red carpet, explicitly talking about creating a work to address the trauma of domestic violence and to honor survivors.
One of the many online followers castigating Lively wrote: “As a DV survivor, I am absolutely disgusted by the cutesy way this film is being promoted. Like it’s a rom-com, grab your girls and your florals? I wish you could feel empathy to the deep and dark things myself and other women have had to experience.”
LONDON, ENGLAND – AUGUST 08: Blake Lively attends the “It Ends With Us” UK Gala Screening at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on August 08, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Sony Pictures)
Others said Lively was “glamorizing” domestic violence” and explained how she was being “gross,” “tasteless,” “unprofessional” and (expletive) tone deaf,” turning the film’s campaign into “the Blake and Ryan show” or an opportunity to do promotional tie-ins to her other companies.
Again, this isn’t the first time Lively has been caught up in what comes across as her sense of her own fabulousness. There was the time about 10 years ago when the California-born and ‘reared “Gossip Girl” star was going through her Southern Belle phase, and she and Reynolds decided to host a stylish wedding and reception at the Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina — with the help of her pal Martha Stewart. For the wedding, Lively donned a custom couture Marchessa ballgown, and the couple and their guests enjoyed the backdrop of a stately mansion, oak trees and the picturesque tidal marsh seen in the movie “The Notebook.”
What Lively didn’t talk about in any of her post-wedding interviews is that Boone Hall also was the setting for pre-Civil War human rights abuses, with brick slave dwellings also being a part of the backdrop. Dozens of Black people were enslaved at Boone Hall. The year before her wedding, the plantation was prominently mentioned in the New York Times as a popular Southern destination trying to address its slave-holding past.
Yet, “caught up in the weeds of tablescapes and menus, neither Lively nor Reynolds stopped to consider what it meant to actually wed at a plantation, the pretty backdrop not quite covering up the atrocities committed,” E! News reported.
Lively’s Southern belle fixation continued. In 2014, she launched launch Preserve, her lifestyle and e-commerce site that sold pricey clothing and home decor items that were inspired by “the allure” of the antebellum South. Almost immediately, Preserve came under fire for a newsletter the site published, actually titled “Allure of the Antebellum.” The newsletter featured a photo of a stylishly dressed white woman posing on a columned porch. The post praised Southern Belles for possessing “inherent social distinction” and setting “standards for style and appearance.”
In response, a writer for Jezebel said, “Women of inherent social distinction … Soooo, slave owners then? Like, you’re definitely talking about people who owned slaves. Or perhaps, more accurately, the wives of slave owners who greatly benefited from and helped uphold the institution.”
Preserve soon shut down. AdWeek said in October 2015 there were several reasons the site failed, including the fact that it sold ridiculously overpriced products. But the no. 1 reason? AdWeek said that the site had been “tone deaf.”
Despite the Preserve debacle, photos from Lively and Reynolds’ plantation wedding continued to flourish on Pinterest, The Knot and other wedding-planning platforms. Their wedding, it seemed, provided inspiration for other brides with Southern belle ambitions.
LONDON, ENGLAND – AUGUST 08: Blake Lively attends the “It Ends With Us” photocall at IET Building: Savoy Place on August 08, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Sony Pictures)
The couple finally started to face a reckoning in 2018, according to E! News. That’s when Reynolds sent out a well-meaning post on X (then Twitter), congratulating the makers of “Black Panther” for creating the first blockbuster film featuring a Black superhero. Reynold’s tweet was met with derision, with one follower replying, “u got married on a plantation.”
But it would take another two years and the mass protests over the killing of George Floyd for Lively and Reynolds to finally express “shame” for their plantation-wedding choice, E! News reported. Reynolds, being named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business in 2020, told the publication that the plantation choice is “something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for.”
“It’s impossible to reconcile,” Reynolds said. “What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy.”
But Lively’s “shame” over her “tone-deaf” choices only seemed to last so long. In a 2023 interview, she lamented the failure of Preserve, without mentioning anything about about how it promoted slave-owner “style,” according to E! News. In talking to Entrepreneur, Lively blamed unspecified “behind-the-scenes stuff that we just couldn’t figure out” and hurtful press coverage that seemed to take delight in her internet company’s closure. “It was scary,” Lively said.
In the interview, Lively talked up another of her ventures, Betty Buzz, her line of non-alcoholic sparkling mixers. She also tried to wrap herself in a message about how it’s hard to be a woman who demands excellence. She said, “”It’s an interesting thing to claim as a woman: being detailed and being precise. Because that can be weaponized against you as being difficult.”
Now, Lively is facing backlash because she’s a woman who, her online critics say, can be oblivious, insensitive and self-serving. She also didn’t help matters, they say, with her “little Instagram Story” post with the domestic violence hotline number. “It is not authentic and genuine whatsoever,” someone wrote on her latest Instagram post, advising her to not follow up with a more formal apology for her “insensitivity.” The person said, “Don’t bother because your real and true motives showed.”