I’m convinced this horny book adaptation could change the rom-com film genre

The casting of an upcoming rom-com has fans pretty feral and could mean huge things for the genre (Picture: Getty/Shutterstock/Metro.co.uk)

A fresh casting announcement has absolutely thrilled fans and convinced me that the film in question could end up as one of the most popular and anticipated movies in years.

It could also signal the early era of another rom-com giant, à la Richard Curtis, or the coming of a film about love with the power to impact pop culture like When Harry Met Sally or 10 Things I Hate About You.

I am, of course, talking about the announcement via Deadline of Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman to play the romantic leads in the movie adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s best-selling novel (and – I cannot stress this enough – actual BookTok sensation) The Love Hypothesis.

Cautiously, as both a film critic and a fan of Hazelwood’s, I see the potential this has to change the cinematic rom-com genre.

For those who haven’t been wrapped up in the quite astounding way TikTok has revived the publishing industry since lockdown – even garnering its own name for that corner of the social site – The Love Hypothesis was one of the platform’s biggest breakout successes following the novel’s formal publication in 2021.

But what has now shifted this film up a notch in terms of anticipation is how the casting has seemingly leaned into the famous early inspirations of Hazelwood’s book.

And it’s this which makes me confident everyone’s obsession is about to go stratospheric.

The Love Hypothesis is one of the biggest breakout hits of the BookTook movement, so naturally Hollywood called Riverdale’s Lili Reinhart is the female protagonist, Olive (Picture: Getty)

The Love Hypothesis follows PhD student Olive Smith (Reinhart), a rising star in Stanford University’s biology department, who ends up in a classic fake dating situation with a hotshot professor, Dr Adam Carlsen (Bateman).

Everything kicks off when she does the totally normal thing of panic kissing him at the lab to convince her best friend she has a boyfriend. And he does the totally normal thing of agreeing afterwards to maintain the lie for… reasons.

However, The Love Hypothesis actually began in 2018 as Head Over Feet, a piece of Star Wars fan fiction published online by Hazelwood, which was inspired by the ‘Reylo’ shipping many fans did between the characters of Rey (Daisy Ridley) and antagonist Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).

This is a romance that almost bore fruit in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker – and it’s one that now has another fascinating link to The Love Hypothesis, for Bateman in the role of Adam is actually Rey actress Ridley’s husband in real life.

Tom Bateman has been cast opposite her as the brooding male lead, Adam (Picture: Getty) As The Love Hypothesis started as ‘Reylo’ fan fiction, some had hoped for real inspiration Adam Driver – but Bateman also has fans agog (Picture: Dominique Charriau/WireImage)

Although some were holding out for Driver to take on the role his character inspired (get a hold of yourselves, that man will not), many are tickled pink by this meta casting move – ‘I’m cackling’ posts are littered across social media – whether it was deliberate or not.

‘The concept of playing the love interest in fan fiction about your wife is kind of insane, I think Tom Bateman won in life,’ tweeted Alysa, while @rejectedcarebear wrote on Reddit: ‘This is actually the best part of the entire movie.’

‘They had a chance and they took it for sure haha!’ added another fan, while @pertifty shared: ‘I love this timeline we are living. I wonder why she didn’t want to play Olive if her husband is playing Adam??’ (As many then explained, there is such a thing as too on the nose.)

The excitement alone that’s been drummed up by the casting announcement of two semi well-known but hardly A-List actors – Reinhart made her name on Riverdale and Bateman appeared in Da Vinci’s Demons as well as Sir Kenneth Branagh’s star-studded Murder on the Orient Express – confirms this is a watershed moment for BookTok and cinema.

The British actor is the real-life husband of Daisy Ridley, the actress who played the Rey part of ‘Reylo’ in the most recent Star Wars trilogy of films (Picture: Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)

Because now we’ve gone from mild interest that this adaptation is happening to fully seated for it. And Reinhart is a canny operator, fueling fan excitement with lots of fun posts about the film on – where else – but TikTok.

Yes, there have been popular BookTok adaptations previously, such as Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue and Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You. Both, co-incidentally, star Nicholas Galitzine and were made for Amazon’s streaming service Prime Video.

The Love Hypothesis is going a step further, being produced by Amazon MGM Studios. This suggests the company’s confidence in the movie’s potential cinematic success but also means its streaming home will likely end up being Prime Video too. Could Amazon be the next rom-com powerhouse in its film endeavours, snapping up the major romance book titles that capture the zeitgeist?

I live in hope.

We’re kind of half-way here with The Love Hypothesis’s casting, but further would have been too far (Picture: Disney) @lilireinhart

Olive Smith ???? #thelovehypothesis

♬ Lover – Taylor Swift

And let’s not beat around the bush, The Love Hypothesis will be bigger than those previous films anyway because it’s hornier – don’t let the cartoon humans on the book’s front cover fool you, Hazelwood likes a lot of detail in her sex scenes. ‘Spicy’ as the common euphemistic terminology claims.

Many audience members will be pulled in simply by curiosity over how that might look onscreen; let’s call it the Fifty Shades of Grey factor.

And if The Love Hypothesis does well, there are also several other Hazelwood novels ripe for adaption – from Love on the Brain to Problematic Summer Romance and Deep End (for the uninitiated, that one will truly have you blushing). This is where the rom-com redefinition could come into play.

Hazelwood, a real-life former neuroscience professor has made a name for herself as a ‘STEMinist’ author thanks to her female characters often being in science and tech fields and academia, drawing upon her own experience.

@lilireinhart

hello Dr. Adam Carlsen #thelovehypothesis

♬ Illegal – PinkPantheress

She’s also an expert at the romantic tropes of pining and misunderstandings – we’ve loved them since Jane Austen’s time – but puts them in modern workplace settings. This could easily be what the next wave of rom-coms looks like if they’re inspired by or directly drawn from the pen of Hazelwood.

We’d also be moving on from Richard Curtis’s bumbling, British and sweary romances to Hazelwood’s quirky, introverted and brainy (often American) heroines.

And as for the, er, spice? Well, there are entire TikTok videos dedicated to chapter 16 so Hazelwood’s fans will have high expectations over the depiction of that. She’s become as popular as she has among readers for prioritising female pleasure, something with which the movie industry has historically and frequently struggled.

And it’s just another reason I think the world of onscreen rom-coms is more than ready to embrace The Love Hypothesis as the start of its next phase – and evolution.

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