Photos of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni on the set of 'It Ends with Us' are causing a storm on TikTok with fans questioning whether the filmmakers even read the book
- The first photos of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni on the set of "It Ends with Us" have surfaced.
- They are playing Lily Bloom and Ryle Kincaid in the adaptation of the TikTok-favorite book.
The first photos from the set of "It Ends with Us" have surfaced, and fans on social media aren't exactly impressed.
On Monday, photos of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni filming scenes for the upcoming movie adaptation of Colleen Hoover's 2016 novel began circulating on social media.
On TikTok, where the book is a long-standing favorite and has gained a massive following among younger audiences, some users are sharing disappointing reactions to the photos from the movie set and specifically the casting of Baldoni and Lively.
The romance novel follows 23-year-old Lily Bloom as she moves to Boston to start her life after university. She meets and falls in love with a 30-year-old doctor called Ryle Kincaid, but is faced with a challenge as her first love, Atlas Corrigan, reappears after many years.
In January, Hoover shared that Lively and Baldoni, who is also directing the film, are bringing the characters of Lily and Ryle to life onscreen. During the announcement, the author called Lively her "dream Lily" and said that when she met Baldoni she immediately "wanted him to be Ryle."
At the time, the announcement left fans divided and caused a storm on social media, with some highlighting that Lively and Baldoni are much older than their characters in the book – the actors are 35 and 39, respectively.
Now that the first photos have surfaced, which were shared by the Mail Online on Tuesday, fans are back on social media sharing their mixed reaction. The images showed Lively with red, wavy hair and wearing a brown summer dress. In some pictures, she layered the dress underneath a pink t-shirt and pink jacket. Baldoni wore a simple black long-sleeved shirt and black pants.
Representatives for Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and Colleen Hoover did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Pop-culture TikToker Nique Coleman shared a TikTok on Monday showing some of the photos from the set as well as her views.
In the clip, which has over 1.3 million views as of Tuesday, Coleman said the pictures confirmed "the fears" most readers had when the casting was first announced. "Let me just say I love Blake Lively, I love her so much, but this is not Lily Bloom," she added.
"This is just not at all what the book was giving, and, you know, maybe we just need to trust the process, but I kind of just hate that they decided to cast so much older than what the characters in the book were," she said. "This is just not at all how I would picture Lily and Ryle."
Some users commenting on Coleman's video agreed, pointing out that aging up the characters could impact the "whole story."
"Her youth being taken away by the relationship made it feel so much more fragile and heartbreaking," one user wrote, referring to the character of Lily.
Another user said Baldoni and Lively may just have been what Hoover pictured.
Podcaster Chloe Breana shared her thoughts on the photos in another popular TikTok that has over 268,600 views. "Whoever is in charge of making this movie has not read the book," she said in the video. "This is not Lily. I don't know who it is but it's not Lily."
"I'm just at a loss for words, we were already questioning what the movie was going to be like with the casting," she added. "Blake's a great actress, but Lily is supposed to be a young, fresh girl starting her life in Boston. The wig, the outfit, none of this is reading a young girl in her twenties starting life in the big city."