What does this Blake Lively stuff remind you of? For me, it’s sort of like the Hilaria Baldwin stuff in late 2020 and early 2021 – suddenly, people were going back through all of Hilaria’s old interviews and doing deep dives on all of the Hilaria-was-never-Spanish lore. While Blake Lively never lied about being “from Spain,” there is a similar deep-dive into the gossip history around Blake. Like… what was up with Blake and Leighton Meester on Gossip Girl? They apparently didn’t get along at all towards the latter part of the series, so much so they the would barely even speak to each other. The Mail is on the case – go here to read.

Meanwhile, the current Blake situation is that we still don’t know exactly what went down between Blake, Justin Baldoni and the cast of It Ends With Us. Many people around the production maintain this idea that Baldoni and Lively’s larger falling out happened in postproduction, especially when Blake brought in her own editor to create IEWU: The Lively Cut. It was also clear (to me) that Team Blake had already started an increasingly loud whisper campaign about Baldoni, one which scared him enough to hire a crisis management team this week. Well, speaking of all of that, the Hollywood Reporter has an interesting piece about the studio giving a lot of full-throated support for Blake, especially after she screened IEWU: The Lively Cut to Colleen Hoover’s groupies in Texas in June.

In mid-June, star-producer Blake Lively traveled to Dallas to attend author Colleen Hoover’s Book Bonanza for a Q&A in the lead-up to the August release It Ends With Us. Lively surprised the 2,000-plus attendees when she announced they could screen a rough cut of the movie adaptation the following night. The screening of the movie — the first of Hoover’s popular novels to hit the screen — proved to be a stroke of marketing genius for Sony, which bought rights to release the movie from Wayfarer Studios, whose co-founder, Justin Baldoni, both directed and stars in the film.

“Colleen Hoover’s Book Bonanza and her fans sparked the fire that was the beginning of the cultural movement,” says Josh Greenstein, a veteran marketer and president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group.

Absent, however, from the Dallas gathering was Baldoni. The version shown that night was Lively’s preferred rough cut of the movie.

By the time the movie opened Aug. 9, an ugly war had erupted on TikTok and other social media platforms pitting Baldoni and Lively against each other. Many took aim at Lively, despite reports that some cast and crewmembers, including Lively, felt uncomfortable over Baldoni’s behavior on set.

Sony is fully in sync with Lively. “Blake, Colleen and so many women put so much effort into this remarkable movie, working selflessly from the start to ensure that such an important subject matter was handled with care. Audiences love the movie. Blake’s passion and commitment to advancing the conversation around domestic violence is commendable,” Sony Pictures Entertainment Chair-CEO Tony Vinciquerra told The Hollywood Reporter. “We love working with Blake, and we want to do 12 more movies with her.”

Sony’s marketing campaign — in staying true to Hoover’s book — conveyed that It Ends With Us isn’t a story of victimhood, but a story of redemption. It traverses falling in love, becoming an entrepreneur, friendship and family, alongside pain and trauma. “Lily is a survivor and a victim, but that doesn’t define her, as she is in charge of her identity and her story. These themes were important to the campaign,” says one source connected to the film’s rollout.

Sources have told THR that there was a fracture between Baldoni and Lively in the postproduction stage, wherein two different cuts of the movie emerged. Lively commissioned a cut of the movie from editor Shane Reid, who was an editor on Deadpool & Wolverine, according to multiple sources.

[From THR]

This reads to me like why Baldoni hired crisis managers in the first place, because he was afraid he was going to get squished by the studio taking Blake’s side and throwing him under the bus. Sony is obviously doing the most to stay on Blake’s good side, and not only that, Sony is seemingly doing a lot (here and behind-the-scenes) to keep the arguments from devolving into petty, personal attacks. It suits everyone involved if the story is “Blake and Justin disagreed about which edit to use, that’s the big problem” rather than “Justin fat-shamed Blake and gave her a lingering kiss” or “Blake is a mean-girl bully.”

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.