Major spoilers for It Ends With Us and the book It Starts With Us are ahead! If you want to see the movie, it’s in theaters now, and you can buy both of Colleen Hoover’s novels about Lily Bloom wherever you get your books.
A major symbol in It Ends With Us is an open heart. It is a sign of Atlas and Lily’s young love, because when they were teens, Atlas carved it out of wood for her, and later on Lily got it tattooed on her collarbone. This tattoo is also where Ryle bit her during his most violent moment, clouding the pure story behind it. However, Atlas never knows about it in that first book by Colleen Hoover, he finds out about it in the sequel novel, It Starts With Us. That all changed though in the film that recently premiered on the 2024 movie schedule, and Hoover told us how she felt about it.
In the film adaptation of It Ends With Us, Brandon Sklenar's Atlas took Blake Lively’s Lily to the hospital, as he did in the book, after Ryle bit her. While there, he noticed her tattoo. It's a touching scene in the film. However, as a book fan, it was shocking, because this revelation of the tattoo with the scars around it is integral to the second novel as it eventually leads to Atlas and Lily’s first kiss as adults.
So, when I interviewed Colleen Hoover and Brandon Sklenar about It Ends With Us for CinemaBlend, I had to ask about this massive change from the book. In response, the author told me why it left her “a little jarred” at first. She started her explanation about why by saying:
I actually feel like, I don't know which came first the second book or reading the first script. I can't remember, but I know seeing it on film was a different experience, because in the first draft, I feel like it was more of a fun moment between them.
"Fun" is not the tone that the scene requires. It's a heavy moment for both characters, specifically Lily, and it gets even more complex when Atlas realizes what the tattoo means with those scars. To that point, Hoover told me:
And so in editing, we pulled back a little and didn't have as much conversation surrounding it, because I was like, ‘That's a really big moment where he's kind of upset to see this tattoo and the marks on it, and it would be hard for him,’ you know? So, I don't think he would relate it back to, like, fun times between them. So the first time I saw it, I was a little jarred. But then once editing happened around that scene, it became one of my favorite scenes.
In It Starts With Us, Atlas has a complex reaction to seeing Lily’s tattoo, he also straight up says he didn’t notice it the night he took her to the hospital in the first book. It’s an emotionally rich moment that is bitter and sweet because he’s realized that this gesture of Lily’s love for him was a cause of pain when it came to her relationship with Ryle. In the second novel, this is how the moment went down:
‘I heard you tell the nurse he bit you, but I wasn’t close enough to see that…’ Atlas pauses midsentence and swallows hard. ‘I wasn’t close enough to see that you had the tattoo, and that he bit…’ Atlas stops speaking again. He’s so upset, he can’t even finish his sentence. He just moves on to another one. ‘Is that why he did it? Because he read your journals and knew you got the tattoo for me?’
While this leads to their first kiss, this interaction between Atlas and Lily in It Starts With Us is incredibly serious. And Hoover said that when that conversation was moved up to be in the hospital scene in It Ends With Us she was “a little jarred” because it came off as “fun” at first. However, as they edited the film, they found the right tone, and now, that conversation in the film is very close tonally to the one they have in the second book.
With all book-to-screen adaptations, change is expected, and as a reader of both books in Colleen Hoover’s series, this update shocked me the most. However, I also found it fitting, and it seems like she did too. It added more meaning to Atlas and Lily’s relationship early on, and it incorporated a layer of complexity to their relationship as they both thought about those scars and the tattoo.
Now, the question becomes: If It Starts With Us becomes a film how will they deal with the fact that an integral scene got moved up? Considering It Ends With Us has gotten favorable reviews, and it is a faithful adaptation of the book, I’m sure they’ll handle it well, and I’ll be curious to hear what Colleen Hoover thinks about it.
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