Fifty Shades of Twilight: Will It Ends With Us Break The Curse of Toxic Adaptations?
The hyped romance bestseller It Ends With Us will be adapted as a movie, and that with a star cast of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.
However, the movie better not fall into the same trap as Fifty Shades of Gray, Twilight, and others.
What do the Twilight movies, the After series, the Fifty Shades movies and the Netflix hit 365 Days have in common?
They are all dripping with sexism, role stereotypes and toxic relationships in which the man makes all the decisions and the woman has to obey.
In 365 Days, for example, the protagonist is kidnapped by a mafia boss who gives her one year to fall in love with him.
The Twilight saga follows a 104-year-old vampire stalking a teenage girl Bella, controlling her life, putting her in multiple dangers and punishing her with love withdrawal.
Fifty Shades of Gray — created as Twilight fan fiction — does exactly the same thing, with a focus on BDSM. The After movie franchise follows generally the same ideas.
There are all basically about powerful men and their female victims being emotionally and physically abused.
The supposed happy endings in these stories? The victim marries their "protector". The consequence? Especially young people or people with little romantic experience believe that love has to look like this.
In It Ends With Us, an upcoming heir apparent to the movies above, we meet the character of Lily as she escapes her violent home to start a new life and meets the attractive Ryle.
Later on Ryle develops pathological jealousy, hits Lily and puts her under psychological pressure. The Coleen Hoover's book got aggressively negative reviews from readers, calling it "trash" and "garbage."
"[It's] a little concerning how many of her books are treated as easy romance reads that cause sappy feelings while actively including and romanticizing abuse, legal adults having sex with minors, incest, and years of relationships under false pretenses.
None of this stuff should be normalized and certainly not romanticized for teens to think is healthy or romantic in relationships," Redditor korra14 says.
It is almost certain that the film starring Blake Lively will be a success. The original book, which went viral on TikTok, has sold over four million copies worldwide. It's also no secret that the genre itself also works well in movie form.
But that also means that It Ends With Us bears a great deal of responsibility. It must become some sort of antidote to the "toxic relationship" genre.
However, the formula works too well for that and Hollywood doesn't miss any money-making opportunities. But hey, one can still hope, right?