Blake Lively and her film It Ends With Us: the reviews explained

Blake Lively's It Ends With Us is the second biggest American film, but it's the conflict surrounding the film, not the film itself, that everyone's talking about.

Apparently, Lively and her costars are at odds with lead director Justin Baldoni. Baldoni and Lively reportedly don't get along, and he allegedly shamed Lively by asking someone how much Lively weighed. A scene involving the two of them requires him to hug her, and he was afraid of hurting his back. And rumor has it that he didn't appreciate Lively bringing her husband Ryan Reynolds on set to direct some of the scenes.

But while Baldoni has been the talk of the town (he's even hired a seasoned PR executive who counts Johnny Depp among her clients), the hubbub has many people online turning their attention to Lively, who is showing her face on the silver screen for the first time in four years. Many have noted that Lively has taken a unique approach to promoting the film. In an attempt to sell her movie, Lively has promised viewers laughs and girly moments. Meanwhile, the actress, known for her beautiful hair, has launched a hair care line.

This approach to the sisterhood of the traveling Stanley Cups stands in stark contrast to the film's plot: Lively's protagonist, an aspiring florist named Lily Bloom, falls in love with a physically abusive man (Baldoni). Lively's apparent lack of interest and emotional intelligence about this sensitive subject has raised questions and backlash about whether she knows what kind of movie she's made, and it's led some to question what we thought we knew about Lively herself.

Blake Lively's It Ends With Us press tour consisted of selling Blake Lively merchandise

Movie press tours are not an exciting activity. They usually consist of actors answering the same questions over and over again from various media outlets, all in the hopes that they will say something that will entice you to see the movie they are promoting. The monotonous repetition of the movie publicity cycle is exactly why the unusual Lively and It Ends With Us tour has attracted so much attention.

For starters, Lively and director/screen partner Baldoni have been promoting the film separately, which is extremely odd for lead actors. They're also doing these interviews, as my colleague Kyndall Cunningham detailed, amid a series of rumors that the two had a falling out on set.

But what Lively said while promoting the film is also getting attention. In a video clip promoting the film on TikTok, Lively says to gather your friends, bring flowers, and go see it!

In addition to Lively's remarks about girls' nights out watching domestic violence, she's been promoting her new Blake Brown hair care line and her Betty Buzz beverage company. She's used the red carpet to get audiences thinking about her husband's new film, the hyper-violent and profane Marvel blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine , while giving Reynolds, not screenwriter Christy Hall or author Colleen Hoover, credit for writing the film's iconic rooftop scene.

In one promo clip, she is seen joking with her costars about their zodiac signs, while another shows Lively talking about wearing her own clothes in the film, a gesture that seems to be related to her dressing one of her costars on one of the film's red carpets. And in one of her interviews, a reporter who is clearly familiar with the film's sensitive themes asks her how the film might inspire people to reach out to her and talk about abuse. Lively casually dismisses the question as a joke about hypothetically not sharing her location or phone number with these fans instead of, as many would have preferred, promoting domestic violence services.

Lively's critics have pointed out the disconnect between Lively's presentation of her film as a girls' night out and the actual content, in which a woman is subjected to violence by her romantic partner. Carrying flowers and gathering the girls to watch a woman be physically assaulted by her partner seems, at best, a strange absence of purpose and, at worst, extremely insensitive or disconnected from the subject of her film. Either Lively does not fully understand the subject of the film she has made, or she does and is using it to sell her products.

While tabloids like TMZ are reporting a behind-the-scenes PR war between Lively and Baldoni, this part of the reaction is coming from Lively, all by herself, answering these questions in the way she chooses.

Blake Lively's It Ends With Us Press Tour Continues a Long Line of Bad Interviews She's Had

When actors have those moments where they seem to stop acting like the fun, good people they are, it often leads citizens to wonder if the celebrity in question has always been that way or if they are displaying unusual behavior. Lively rose to fame playing the wealthy, carefree Serena van der Woodsen on Gossip Girl, and in many ways, that character's glamorous but selfish image meshed with her own. During her film hiatus, she is best known for her relationships with Reynolds, but perhaps most notably Taylor Swift. This popularity perhaps contributes to, as one commentator put it, a mean-girl vibe. Unfortunately for Lively and her image, she has given some rather off-putting interviews that have been easy to find.

One such interaction is a Caf Society press conference on YouTube titled “The Blake Lively Interview That Made Me Want to Quit My Job.” Journalist Kjersti Flaa posted her 2016 clip with Lively on August 10, in the midst of this controversy. In the clip, Flaa congratulates Lively on her pregnancy, to which Lively passive-aggressively responds by congratulating Flaa, who is not pregnant, on her baby bump. (Prior to her interaction with Flaa, Lively had confirmed her pregnancy to the press.) After Lively’s quip, she and co-star Parker Posey barely make eye contact with Flaa, and Lively continues to dismiss or aggressively respond to Flaa’s questions about the film, almost as if Flaa were not in the room.

Blake Lively with Ryan Reynolds and Deadpool and Wolverine co-star Hugh Jackman at the screening of It Ends With Us. Lively has been doing her press tour for the film separately from her co-star Justin Baldoni. Cindy Ord/Getty Images

During that same press tour, Lively also said that Caf Society director Woody Allen was actually a good director. At the time, Ronan Farrow had recently written a column in the Hollywood Reporter criticizing the film industry's response to his sister Dylan Farrow's sexual abuse allegations against their father. Lively, when asked about Allen, said: I could [only] know my experience. And my experience with Woody is [that] It empowers women.

Going back further, critics have found this to be Lively’s first foray into lifestyle branding, and a misstep. In 2014, Lively created an e-commerce and digital lifestyle site called Preserve. One of the first pages was titled The Allure of the Antebellum, casting the site’s name in a certain light. The shoot was a romanticized version of the pre-Civil War South and failed to address the reality that these pretty outfits were rooted in a time of slavery. It’s also worth noting that Lively and husband Ryan Reynolds got married on a South Carolina plantation in 2012 (and later apologized), which may contextualize Lively’s fascination with antebellum aesthetics, despite the actor being born and raised in Los Angeles. (Reynolds, for her part, is famously from Canada.)

Lively's reserve lasted about a year.

It’s not hard to connect the dots between Lively praising Woody Allen for his kindness to women, Lively being blatantly mean to a reporter, and Lively glossing over the blatant trauma and pain of slavery with the casual way she behaves on the promotional circuit for It Ends With Us. While being famous and having every word you say recorded, especially the ones you regret, is no easy feat, this behavior fits a pattern Lively has exhibited before.

A more telling explanation for this confusing mess might be to acknowledge that Lively and her husband are increasingly interested in the business side of their acting careers, perhaps even more than the acting.

In addition to Lively’s hair care line, his soda line, and his impending foray into fashion, Reynolds has invested in and been the face of a number of businesses. He owns a stake in telecommunications company Mint Mobile, Welsh football club Wrexham, and, until recently, a similar stake in Aviation Gin. He’s even the CEO of a marketing company, aptly named Maximum Effort. Lively and Reynolds are arguably better at selling their lifestyle and their name than they are at acting. For many people, drinking the same alcohol as Ryan Reynolds or having the same hair as Blake Lively is more desirable than watching a Ryan Reynolds or Blake Lively movie.

When movies are so clearly secondary to their personal brand, as we saw with Lively and It Ends With Us, their films become advertisements, ways to further promote their brands and themselves. During the It Ends With Us press tour, Lively spoke not only about how Reynolds changed the script, but also the film’s shots, and brought in Deadpool & Wolverine editor Shane Reid to help her edit the film. The advertisements function as a cross-promotion for her husband’s film and her credibility as a director and actor.

With It Ends With Us, Lively was faced with a big-budget movie that offered content that her brand probably didn't want to be associated with. Blake Lively, the brand, was in a fight with Blake Lively, the actor. In this case, the brand won; Lively chose to put her efforts into the service of her brand. Unfortunately for the brand, it's Blake Lively's movie and her complicated image that we can't stop talking about.

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