There's Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively Drama — Is It Crashing 'It Ends With Us' Film Promotion?

The hotly-anticipated movie It Ends With Us hits theaters on Aug. 9, 2024. As fans know, the film, based on the much-buzzed-about book by Colleen Hoover, stars Blake Lively as Lily Bloom and Justin Baldoni as her abusive lover, Ryle Kincaid.

Justin, incidentally, is also the film's director. Although fans are super invested in the characters, there is allegedly some turmoil happening off-screen. What's up with the Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively drama? Read on for details.

According to one Redditor, there's tension between Justin and the rest of the cast, as well as author Colleen.

"Blake Lively isn’t following him on Instagram (though she definitely was early on), nor is the rest of the main cast or Colleen Hoover, even though he follows all of them and recently did a promo event with Colleen. And yet they all follow one another — but not Justin," the sleuth said.

But wait, there's more!

The Redditor also claims that Justin is not included in "any of the endless promo on Blake’s social media," although "she loves to mention numerous people in those captions so skipping over the director/lead actor seems like a choice!"

A quick perusal of Justin's social media shows that he was recently sick with an infection and spent a week in the hospital. So that could explain why he hadn't been promoting the film as heavily for a hot minute.

Is he still promoting the film now?

At the time of writing, Justin is heavily promoting the movie on his social media. But according to TikTok creator Jenna Redfield, he's been keeping his distance at press events — and she shared multiple photos from the New York City premiere as proof.

In a separate TikTok, Jenna shared her theories as to why Justin and Blake are potentially sparring behind the scenes of the film, including that Blake and her husband Ryan Reynolds, both producers on this project, wanted more creative control and have resentment as a result.

Another theory is that any Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively drama is just PR meant to stir up more interest in the movie, but this seems fishy because It Ends With Us is slated to have a huge opening weekend, with Variety estimating the film could earn as much as $35 million.

Other theories include that Justin did something unsavory that Blake and company are looking to distance themselves from, or that he was flat-out hard to work with and there's some bad blood between him and the rest of the cast.

But as one commenter pointed out, this wasn't Justin's first time directing, so this is an unlikely theory.

For now, no one is saying anything. Perhaps the tea will come out after the movie has been in theaters for a while. Either way, both actors are already getting good reviews, with The Guardian saying Blake is "a warm and instinctive performer" and that she has "effective chemistry" with Justin.

Indeed, the movie got three stars and is hailed as a flick worth seeing, perhaps even more so because of what could be happening off-screen.