This article covers a developing story. Continue to check back with us as we will be adding more information as it becomes available.
Justin Baldoni explains why It Ends With Us changed the ending from the book. Baldoni is the director and star of It Ends With Us, a just-released romance film based on the Colleen Honovel of the same name. In the film, a woman named Lily thinks she has escaped her traumatic childhood when she enters a relationship with a man named Ryle, only to find herself locked in the same cycle of abuse due to Ryle’s problematic actions. Blake Lively plays Lily opposite Baldoni’s Ryle, with a supporting cast that includes Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj, and Kevin McKidd.
Speaking with TheWrap, Baldoni explains why he changed a key aspect of Ryle’s ending in the movie. Check out the full quote from Baldoni below:
In the original draft, we had a scene in the epilogue where we see Ryle dropping off their child to Lily, and they have a short conversation. It was written in a way that showed that they’ve overcome a lot over the last two years.
And I wasn’t fully comfortable with it. And no one wasn’t fully comfortable with it, and we were trying to find a way to make it work, to honor the book, but too much had to be done in such a short window to explain how they could possibly be co-parenting.
I don’t want to open up a can of worms and have a conversation about, you know, should a man like Ryle be allowed to co-parent? You know, what’s an acceptable amount of work that that someone has to do in that situation? It was just way too much.
The truth is, from our research and from our partners, we know that the majority of men go back to being abusers, and that’s the fact. And then it didn’t feel right to tell a story about a man who was a minority in that, because that wouldn’t be honoring the original intention of why we were trying to tell the story.
So the best ending for Ryle was to look at his wife and kid, and the life that he could have had, the life that he blew up, and to walk out the door and for us not see him again. And that was, for me, what felt the best in adapting the book and turning into a film is to say bye to him there.
More to come…
Source: TheWrap
