It Ends With Us’ first trailer was a huge hit, Deadline exclusively reported.

The Sony Pictures and Wayfarer Studios’ film is executive produced by star Blake Lively. It garnered 128.1 million views in the first 24 hours of its launch, according to WaveMetrix. As of today, that number has risen to 222 million.

To compare, Universal’s trailer for Wicked Part One, had 112.9 million views during the first day of its release. The billion-dollar grossing film Barbie’s trailer last year brought in 101.6 million in the comparable period.

It Ends With Us: The trailer to end all trailers?

Even Lively’s bestie, Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour trailer only had 96.2 million views. The Zendaya-led film Challengers only garnered 75.0 million, while the highly anticipated trailer for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes got 61.6 million.

The movie is directed by and co-starring Justin Baldoni from Christy Hall’s script. It Ends With Us is an adaptation of the massive bestselling book of the same name by popular romance novel author Colleen Hoover. This is the first feature film adaptation of her work.

The story follows Lily Bloom (Lively), who overcomes her childhood trauma and sets on to make a new life for herself in Boston to fulfill her dream of opening her own business. She meets the charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni) and they fall in love.

However, Lily begins to see the cracks in their intense relationship which reminds her of her parents’. Then her first love, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), suddenly reappears and makes her question her relationship with Lyle. Lily must learn to find the strength to make a choice.

The film also stars Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj and Amy Morton. Saks Picture Company’s Alex Saks, Wayfarer Studios’ Jamey Heath and writer Hall also serve as producers. Hoover is also an EP, along with Steve Sarowitz, Andrew, Ajemian, Andrew Calof and Baldoni on Wayfarer Studios’ behalf. The studio also co-financed the film.

Colleen Hoover: Queen of TikTok

 

The novel was released in 2016. Hoover said she wrote the book based on her parents’ relationship and described it as the hardest book she has ever written. As of 2022, 4 million copies of the book has been sold in the US alone, and 20 million worldwide. It was the bestselling book of 2016.

She wrote the sequel, It Starts With Us, which was released in 2022, as a “thank you” to the fans. It became Simon & Schuster’s most pre-ordered book of all time. The story continues from the end of the first book.

The Times wrote that Hoover has sold more books than James Patterson and John Grisham combined, in 2022. Slate once named her the Queen of BookTok, a corner of TikTok populated by readers, reviewers and writers that have become quite influential in the publishing space.

Hoover dominated the 2022 bestselling list on Amazon, occupying five of the top 10 books: numbers one, It Ends With Us; two, It Starts With Us; three, Verity, published in 2021; six, Reminders of Him, 2022; and seven, Ugly Love, 2014.

To explain the massive numbers that the trailer accumulated would be to also explain Hoover’s success in the publishing world. The author has been largely credited for upending the publishing industry since she has challenged its assumptions about what sells books.

She got her start as writer by self-publishing. Her first novel was Slammed. Seven months after she released it, it reached The New York Times bestseller list. Much of her success comes from her readers who post online reviews and reaction videos religiously. These same readers also create playlists of recommended books, usually the author’s previous ones. This is why many of her current bestsellers are from years ago, something that doesn’t happen often in publishing.

Time will tell if the trailer’s hundreds of millions of views will translate to the same number of movie goers when It Ends With Us is released on Aug. 9.