Cinema Is Dead, And Colleen Hoover KILLED It…

Summary

The host argues that Hollywood has mistaken BookTok popularity for proof that a story will make a good movie. Her main examples are Colleen Hoover’s Verity and The Love Hypothesis: one, in her view, is a tedious thriller stripped of its suspense; the other is a mostly enjoyable rom-com whose central romance never quite comes alive on screen.

Verity: A creepy story loses its creepiness

The host begins with Verity’s setup: struggling writer Lowen is hired to finish a famous author’s book series and moves into the Crawford family home. There, she discovers a disturbing manuscript that makes her question whether Verity is as helpless as she appears—and whether the manuscript is even true. The host thinks the book’s unreliable narrator and eerie atmosphere should have made it an easy, compelling adaptation.

Instead, she found the film dull. She complains that Dakota Johnson’s Lowen seems detached from everything happening around her, while Anne Hathaway gives a much more committed performance. She also mocks the modern house, celebrity cameos, and stilted dialogue—especially Lowen telling Jeremy to stop because he’ll “crush her trachea,” a line the host compares to Grey’s Anatomy.

Her biggest frustration is what the adaptation leaves out: Lowen’s sleepwalking, which helped make her an unreliable narrator, and other details that might have made the manuscript’s claims more unsettling. In their place, she says, the film has an excess of sex scenes. The punchline is that a story she remembers as genuinely frightening became, in her view, painfully boring.

Why Hollywood is chasing BookTok

The host sees It Ends With Us’s box-office success as a turning point: studios noticed that a popular online book already comes with an audience. She argues that this makes adaptations attractive even when the source material—or the finished film—isn’t especially good.

She also pokes fun at romance books with cute, cartoon-style covers that conceal very explicit content, and at BookTok recommendations that lead with “spice ratings” and familiar tropes rather than a story’s plot. Tropes like enemies-to-lovers and fake dating have always existed, she says, but now they can be the whole sales pitch:

“She hates him, he’s obsessed with her, five stars spicy.”

Her concern is that studios are following the sales figures without asking whether the story will work on screen.

The Love Hypothesis: A better movie, but not a convincing romance

The second film follows graduate student Olive, who pretends to date intimidating professor Adam after an impulsive kiss. The host likes Lili Reinhart as Olive, Rachel Marsh as her friend Anh, the supporting cast, and the cheerful soundtrack. She also notes that the book began as Star Wars fanfiction, then jokes that casting Tom Bateman—who is married to Daisy Ridley—may explain his unusual performance as Adam.

Her main complaint is that Bateman comes across as so stiff that the couple has little chemistry, despite Reinhart trying hard to carry the romance. The film also removes pieces she thinks gave Adam more depth, including his friend, and cuts the book’s meaningful reveal that he had been in love with Olive since a chance encounter years earlier. The adaptation keeps the flashback but, she argues, drops the reason it matters.

Some supposedly romantic moments become awkward when acted out. The sunscreen scene inspires “Spanish shame,” and a line calling Olive “edible” makes the host recoil. The most spectacularly awkward moment arrives when “Ride Him Like a Cowboy” plays during the love scene; she describes staring blankly at the screen in disbelief.

Still, she stresses that The Love Hypothesis is not a disaster. It has funny and cute moments, and she enjoyed much of it—she simply never cared enough about whether the leads ended up together.

The takeaway

The host isn’t against adapting popular books. She wants Hollywood to choose stories because they have strong characters and cinematic potential, not just because TikTok made them bestselling hits. She points to a science-fiction favorite and a romance novel she loves as examples of books she believes have the depth and story to make worthwhile films.

The video ends with a request for viewers to comment “trash” if they watched to the end.

Personalities featured or discussed: Marina McBain (host), Colleen Hoover, Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett, Lili Reinhart, Tom Bateman, Rachel Marsh, and Alex Cooper.