The rift between “It Ends With Us” star Blake Lively and her director/co-star Justin Baldoni is not subsiding. Variety is reporting that they are still not on speaking terms, and a sequel is currently in limbo.
The idea of a sequel not happening for a film, budgeted at only $25M, and destined to make $300M worldwide, is highly unusual, then again so is this feud. There’s a lot of bad blood between Baldoni and Lively, to the point where they purposely avoided each other during press for the film.
A sequel to the novel, “It Starts With Us,” has been published, but Baldoni owns the rights to it, and his company Wayfarer would have to greenlight the film. The actor/director is said to be holding off of any negotiations for the sequel.
“This is uncharted territory, and nobody has any idea of what a sequel could look like,” says a source familiar with the situation. “There’s probably no world where these two will work together again.”
Press caught on to the friction between Baldoni and Lively, which seems to stem from an old-fashioned editing room battle. Multiple sources told TheInSneider that there were competing cuts of the film. Apparently, Lively took over Baldoni’s edit despite his cut having scored higher with audiences. How did Lively get away with this? She has a powerful husband, Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool himself, who “basically took over the movie and buddied up to author Colleen Hoover to see that their cut won.”
The end result is that now “[Justin] Baldoni and Blake [Lively] hate each other,” according to Sneider’s sources, adding that Lively has a massive ego and Hollywood can sometimes tend to reward that.
There’s also controversy over Lively actually admitting that Reynolds wrote a key scene that ended up in the film. Sources say that came as news to Baldoni, who thought the scene had been ad libbed by Lively. This could also be a guild violation as Reynolds’ “work” on the film was potentially done during the WGA strikes. As a member of the guild, Reynolds would have been barred from contributing to the screenplay
Baldoni has already nixed the idea of directing the sequel, wryly suggesting, “I think Blake Lively’s ready to direct.”
It’s now been 13 years since "The Grandmaster,” and it doesn’t sound like Wong Kar-wai will be making another film in the near future. His future seems to be on the small screen.