The Love Hypothesis reaches Prime Video on Wednesday 23 September, two weeks from today. The romantic comedy adapts Ali Hazelwood's novel of the same name, one of the biggest breakout romance titles of the past several years.
Lili Reinhart stars as Olive Smith, a biology PhD candidate who impulsively kisses her department's most feared professor, Adam Carlsen, played by Tom Bateman, to convince her best friend she has moved on from an old crush. The kiss becomes a fake relationship with rules neither of them means to keep, and the arrangement stops feeling fake faster than either scientist can account for. Claire Scanlon directs from a script by Sarah Rothschild.
Reinhart and Hazelwood both serve as executive producers, which matters given the novel's route to the page. Before it became a New York Times bestseller, The Love Hypothesis existed online as fan fiction pairing Rey and Kylo Ren from the Star Wars sequels, posted years earlier under a pseudonym. Hazelwood renamed the leads Olive and Adam, dropped the Star Wars references, and built out the academic setting that became the book's signature.
There is a neat irony in the casting. Adam was written as a Kylo Ren stand-in, and Bateman, who plays him, is married to Daisy Ridley, the actress who played Rey, the other half of the pairing that started the whole thing. Neither the film nor its marketing has made anything of the connection, but it is hard to miss once you know the book's history.
The pairing behind the camera has its own case for confidence. Scanlon's first feature was Set It Up, the 2018 Netflix romantic comedy that helped bring the genre back to life, and she spent years directing episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and GLOW before that. What is still unclear is how much of the novel's later chapters make the cut, and whether more Hazelwood adaptations follow if this one connects with her enormous readership.
