Blake Lively’s latest movie, It Ends With Us, is a solid hit and a rare success for a romantic drama among blockbusters. Unfortunately, most of the news surrounding the film hasn’t been about its great box office results, but rather about alleged backstage drama between the lead actress and the director, drama that has come as a shock to Lively herself.
There have been reports of tension and disagreements between Lively, a producer on It Ends With Us, and Justin Baldoni, the male lead and the film’s director. This was then compounded by old interview footage of Lively, which surfaced around the same time and painted the star in a negative light. People quotes an unnamed insider saying that Lively felt “out of control” of the whole situation and added…
[She was] pretty surprised at the backlash and drama.
Certainly, Blake Lively was expecting all the talk surrounding her new movie to be about the film, and not any alleged behind-the-scenes drama. Instead, we saw a series of stories about problems on the film, and while the initial reports seemed to be critical of Baldoni, eventually fingers started to be pointing at Lively as well. The source goes on…
She initially felt very vulnerable and upset. During the promotion of the movie, not one day went by when she was not in the news in an unfavorable light. She's just not used to this kind of drama.
In the time leading to the release of It Ends With Us fans noticed that Justin Baldoni was doing interviews alone while the rest of the cast was working together more often, leading to rumors of a rift between him and everybody else. While the source of the alleged rift is unclear, it’s reported that the director and producer had some issues leading to Lively getting another editor to take a pass on the film and that her husband Ryan Reynolds did some work on the script.
Lively herself spoke about some of the disagreements on the set of It Ends With Us, detailing a story about a song that she wanted in the movie that others didn’t want to include. Baldoni, for his part, has distanced himself from directing a potential sequel, a statement that is at the very least surprising considering the film’s success and the fact that a sequel novel already exists.
At this point, everything we know is still hearsay. Exactly what the real issues are, or even if there are real issues, is a question. The real story may not come out for quite some time, if it ever is discussed at all. If a sequel to It Ends With Us is being considered, which seems likely, then we can bet any issues will likely be ironed out, as more success like that would be a benefit to everybody involved.
