SPOILERS are ahead for the film and book The Idea of You. You’ve been warned.
So, if you’ve made it past that intro, it’s safe to assume that you streamed the Amazon Prime rom-com The Idea of You this weekend.
The movie centers around a romance between the 40-year-old Solène (Anne Hathaway) and the 24-year-old boy band member Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine) — and so does the 2017 Robinne Lee novel that it’s based on.
Film adaptations of books are often different from the source material, and The Idea of You follows suit in that regard. In fact, the film’s entire ending is a huge change from how the book concluded.
Long story short: In both the book and the film, Solène and Hayes initially break up. In the book, they stay that way — but, in the film, they reunite five years after breaking up.
How does Robinne feel about this substantial shift? She spilled all to Entertainment Weekly, and it sounds like she’s made peace with how it turned out.
The author told EW that she “was not involved at all” in the film, and that she hadn’t even met director Michael Showalter yet — but, her husband was one of the film’s producers. “He has reported back to me about Michael’s changes, so I know some of the reasons he did things he chose to do,” she explained.
She also admitted that she didn’t “know why” a “happy ending” was necessary for the film. “You hope they’ll keep to what you’ve written because it meant something to you, but you also have to think about the box office and viewers and what their audience is going to want to see,” Robinne added.
And, ultimately, Robinne says she feels great about the book’s ending, because a happier ending was “not the story I wanted to tell.”
“I wanted to make a point about how, as women, we put others’ happiness before our own,” she explained. “I wanted it to feel like you were reading this woman’s diary. It’s something that had really happened to her, and she’d gotten caught up in this role and romance, and it almost destroyed her and everything around her, and she had to let it go.”
You can read everything Robinne had to say here.
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