Regretting You

There's a Colleen Hoover adaptation that flew under everybody's radar this fall. It came out on October 24th. It didn't get the press tour drama. It didn't get the TikTok meltdowns. It didn't get millions of people picking sides on the internet. The movie is Regretting You, directed by Josh Boone.

Paramount didn't push this one hard. The marketing budget was clearly smaller than what Sony spent on It Ends With Us last year. You didn't see Allison Williams doing the late night circuit for three weeks straight. The premiere in Berlin on October 12th barely made the entertainment news cycle. Critics have been rough on it—28% on Rotten Tomatoes from 82 reviews. The general audience score tells a different story.

I saw this movie twice in theaters. Once on opening weekend, once two weeks later with my sister who read the book back in 2019. She cried in the third act. I didn't, but I get why she did. The movie works in ways that the critical consensus doesn't capture.

Here's my take: Regretting You might actually be the better Colleen Hoover adaptation. Not the more successful one. Not the more talked-about one. The better one. That's a big claim given what happened with It Ends With Us and its $351 million worldwide gross. Let me explain.

The It Ends With Us Phenomenon

Last summer, the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni adaptation became the biggest story in Hollywood for about six weeks. The movie opened to $50 million domestic. By mid-August it had crossed $100 million in eleven days. By the end of its run, it pulled in $351 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. Sony was thrilled. The BookTok community showed up in force.

The film itself was fine. Lively did solid work. The domestic violence themes were handled with reasonable care despite what some critics said. The production looked good for the budget. There was real craft in there.

The problem came after. The Lively-Baldoni situation turned into a months-long public relations disaster. Lawsuits. Counter-lawsuits. Leaked texts. PR crisis managers. By December 2024, the whole thing had become a legal mess that overshadowed everything else about the movie. I remember sitting in my living room reading the Hollywood Reporter coverage and thinking this was going to affect how studios approached Hoover adaptations going forward.

The off-screen chaos became the story. The actual film got lost in there somewhere.

Josh Boone and the YA Adaptation Track Record

Josh Boone directed The Fault in Our Stars back in 2014. That film cost $12 million to make. It grossed $307 million worldwide. Fox 2000 gave him carte blanche after that.

What he did with that freedom was interesting. He went after Stephen King projects. He made The New Mutants, which got delayed for years and finally came out in 2020 to mixed reception. He directed The Stand miniseries for CBS All Access. The guy clearly wanted to do horror and genre stuff.

Regretting You brought him back to the YA romance space for the first time in over a decade. The material suits him. He understands pacing in these stories. He knows when to hold on a shot and when to cut away. The Fault in Our Stars had this quality where the emotional beats landed without feeling manufactured. Regretting You has moments like that too.

Susan McMartin wrote the screenplay. She also wrote the After films, which are not good movies, but her adaptation work here is noticeably stronger. The mother-daughter dynamic translates well from page to screen. The parallel timeline structure from the novel gets simplified in a way that actually helps the story move.

The cast at the Berlin premiere, October 2025.

The Cast

Mckenna Grace plays Clara. She's come a long way from Young Sheldon. There's a scene about halfway through where she finds out the truth about the accident. Grace holds on her face for maybe four seconds longer than most young actors would. It works.

Allison Williams plays Morgan, Clara's mother. Williams has been doing interesting work since Get Out. She's good at playing women who keep things controlled on the surface. The role requires her to slowly lose that control across two hours. She pulls it off.

Dave Franco shows up as Jonah. He's fine. The role doesn't ask much of him until the last twenty minutes. Mason Thames plays Miller, Clara's love interest. The two younger actors have genuine chemistry. Their scenes at the movie theater and by the city limits sign feel lived-in.

Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald play the characters who die in the opening act. They're in flashbacks throughout. Fitzgerald especially makes an impression despite limited screen time.

Mckenna Grace has grown substantially as an actor since her television days.

The Numbers

Regretting You cost $30 million to produce. It opened to $13.7 million domestic, second place behind the Chainsaw Man movie. As of last week, the worldwide gross sits at $87 million. The film will turn a profit. It won't match It Ends With Us, but that was never a realistic expectation.

The critical response has been harsh. That 28% on Rotten Tomatoes puts it in the company of films that are genuinely bad. Regretting You is not a bad film. It's a conventional one. The beats are familiar. The structure follows a template. Critics who review dozens of movies per month get tired of templates. Regular audiences often don't mind them as much.

What Works

The accident sequence in the first act hits hard. Boone stages it efficiently—you see just enough. The aftermath gets the emotional weight it needs. There's a shot of Allison Williams standing in a hospital hallway that stuck with me for days.

The Morgan and Jonah storyline benefits from Franco and Williams playing against type. Neither actor typically does vulnerable. They both attempt it here with mixed results, but the attempt itself is interesting to watch.

The teenage romance subplot between Clara and Miller is the most conventional element. It's also executed well. Thames brings an awkward sincerity that works for the character. The city limits sign gag from the book translates visually better than I expected.

The birthday dinner scene near the end creates genuine tension. Multiple characters with multiple secrets in one room. McMartin's script does good work there. Everyone talks past each other in a way that feels accurate to real family dysfunction.

What Doesn't Work

The pacing sags in the middle section. There's a stretch of about fifteen minutes where the film repeats emotional beats it already established. Clara is angry at Morgan. Morgan is grieving and hiding things. Clara sneaks out. Morgan discovers this. We cycle through variations on these scenes too many times.

The 2007 flashback sequences feel underwritten. We're supposed to understand why teenage Morgan made the choices she did. The film tells us more than it shows us. Young Morgan barely registers as a character distinct from adult Morgan.

The reveal about the affair lands with less impact than it should. The book builds to this moment across hundreds of pages. The movie gets there in about seventy minutes. Something gets lost in the compression.

Compared to It Ends With Us

It Ends With Us had a bigger star, a more controversial subject matter, and vastly more cultural attention. It also had production drama that became inextricable from the film itself. You can't talk about that movie anymore without talking about everything that happened around it.

Regretting You arrived quietly. It did its business. It's already available on digital platforms. The Blu-ray comes out February 17th. In two years, people will watch it on streaming without any of the baggage that surrounds the other Hoover adaptation.

The filmmaking in Regretting You is more competent than It Ends With Us. Boone has more experience than Baldoni did. The cinematography is cleaner. The edit moves better. These are craft differences that most viewers won't consciously notice but that affect the overall experience.

The story in Regretting You is smaller. A family dealing with loss and secrets. No domestic violence. No social issue messaging. Lower stakes in some ways, but also room for quieter moments that It Ends With Us didn't really have.

The film is now available on digital platforms.

The Hoover Adaptation Pipeline

Verity is coming next. Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett. That one's a thriller, completely different territory from these romance-dramas. Reminders of Him is also in development somewhere. Hoover has become an industry unto herself.

Regretting You won't be remembered as the defining Hoover adaptation. It Ends With Us took that spot already, for better or worse. But Regretting You demonstrates that these films can exist without becoming cultural battlegrounds. Sometimes a movie can just be a movie.

I took my mom to see it last weekend. She hadn't read the book. She hadn't heard anything about Colleen Hoover before. She liked it. She said the mother-daughter stuff felt true. She asked if the book was worth reading. I told her it was.

For 2026 and the Hoover adaptations still to come, Regretting You might end up looking like a template. Keep the budget reasonable. Hire a director with experience. Don't let the press tour become the story. Get in and get out clean.

We'll see if anyone follows that template. Hollywood has a way of learning the wrong lessons.