Spoilers for The Idea of You movie and book.
As The Kids in the Hall once said, with American movies “It’s always the happy ending. Always the football player throw the ball for the big win.†The Idea of You author Robinne Lee is inclined to agree. In her book, the romance between single mom Solène and boy band hottie Hayes Campbell ends bittersweetly. She breaks up with him because the strain is too great on her daughter and her job, and he goes on to live a full and rich live without her. But the Prime Video adaptation tacks a “Five Years Later†coda on the film, showing that Hayes and Sol rekindle their relationship once her daughter is in college. Lee says this classic Hollywood. “It’s America — Hollywood’s going to do what they’re going to do, and they’re going to throw a happy ending on everything,†Lee told Entertainment Weekly. “I don’t know why. You hope they’ll keep to what you’ve written because it meant something to you, but you also have to think about the box office and viewers and what their audience is going to want to see.â€
Lee says she wasn’t involved in the adaptation process, but her producer husband gave her a heads-up on the change. “I have not even spoken to Michael [Showalter] yet,†she said. “My husband’s a producer on this, and he’s spoken to him, and so he has reported back to me about Michael’s changes, so I know some of the reasons he did things he chose to do.†Ultimately she’s fine with letting both the book and the movie stand on their own. “The book is a book, and the movie is a movie,†she said. (And if either resembles self-insert 1D fanfic, then so be it.)