"See You in a Couple of Years!" — Is 'The Half of It' Getting a Sequel?
Updated May 4 2020, 5:43 p.m. ET
We probably don't have to tell you that The Half of It is the best new movie on Netflix these days. The teenage drama tells the queer coming-of-age story of Ellie Chu, a shy and nerdy student who helps carry her own weight in the household by charging her classmates for essays and assignments.
In the process, she gets mixed up with her classmate Paul, who is so desperate to get with his crush, Aster, he's willing to pay Ellie to help him court her through love letters.
One thing leads to another, and the high schoolers' lives and loves become intertwined, to the point where Ellie isn't sure if she's just writing the love letters from Paul's perspective, or has caught some feelings of her own for Aster along the way.
The film is so adorable, Twitter is already up in arms demanding a sequel. "If the hets got a sequel to 'To All the Boys I've Loved Before', the gays better get a sequel to 'The Half Of It'," one fan wrote on Twitter.
"I KNOW IT'S ONLY BEEN OUT FOR AN HOUR," added another passionate viewer, "BUT GIVE 'THE HALF OF IT' A SEQUEL."
Keep reading for everything you need to know about a possible The Half Of It sequel, as well as a recap on the movie's ending.
How does 'The Half of It' end?
Unlike most teen movies, The Half of It doesn't have a happy ending. Or, rather, it has a lovely ending, but doesn't conclude with some great resolution about who ends up with Aster.
Actually, neither Trig, Paul, nor Ellie does. Aster, however, decides there is more to life than her small closed-minded town of Squahamish and decides to venture out for art school. When she and Ellie share a kiss in the last few moments, we learn that Ellie is off to Grinnell College herself.
"I'll see you in a couple of years," Ellie tells Aster before biking away. And naturally, that had fans speculating whether there was a The Half of It sequel in the works (The Whole Of It? ...just spitballing).
Will there be a 'The Half of It' sequel?
When asked about how she wanted to tackle The Half of It's love triangle, Alice Wu explained that she wasn't initially sure she could fit the whole story into a movie. "I was like, this might be a TV show," she said in an interview with Deadline.
"I just don't think I can in 100 minutes," she continued. "It could get an ending that could either be satisfying and not at all believable or a believable ending that was a bummer. Neither thing felt appealing to me."
While we were initially hoping that Alice might realize we needed a follow-up immediately, it seems she was able to work out a compromise with herself by setting her story in high school, where "you can cover a lot of emotional territory in an authentic way quickly."
And it appears that since she found a way to tell the story she wanted to tell succinctly, The Half of It might actually be one-and-done.
"It's OK that no one ends up with the girl," Alice said in an interview with Netflix. "There's this idea that we're all searching for perfect love, which at the end of the day doesn't exist. But while you're on that doomed quest, you might have a shot at finding out who you are. Every person ultimately ends up finding themselves, which is most important."
As Decider notes, "those don't sound like the words of someone who is plotting a sequel." Which is why it's going to be extra important for fan fiction writers to step up to the plate and take us to Ellie and Aster's reunion years from now, after their respective college experiences.
The Half of It is currently streaming on Netflix.