Uh-oh, sometimes you have to stop putting in maximum effort (because your union is on strike). It Ends With Us actor and director Justin Baldoni was unaware that his star Blake Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, was altering the script, ET confirmed on August 27. That’s relevant because if Reynolds made these changes while the movie was filming during the WGA strike, that would have been against union guidelines. The WGA strike began on May 2, 2023, and ended on September 27, and the movie began filming three days after the strike began, on May 5, per Variety. Reynolds’s participation came to light in one of Lively’s red-carpet interviews.
“The iconic rooftop scene in this movie, my husband actually wrote it,†Lively told E! News. It Ends With Us filmed during and after the strikes, beginning production three days after the WGA strike began, so if that scene was changed in that time, it would be scabbing. Christy Hall, who wrote the screenplay, discussed the altered scene with People on August 8, saying, “There were a few little flourishes that I did not write, but I assumed that they had been improvised on set.†Apparently Deadpool got her!
Questions about Reynolds’s work timeline in relation to the strike were raised by TikToker @Saronthings’s August 10 post about the topic, among others. Whether or not the news that Baldoni did not know about the rewrite implies that Reynolds made the changes close to filming is not yet clear. Vulture reached out to the WGA-West for comment.