How Justin Baldoni Altered Ryle’s Destiny

NOTE: Spoilers ahead for “It Ends With Us”

In any book-to-screen adaptation, changes are bound to happen, and certain plot points may get cut. This holds true for “It Ends With Us,” but the filmmakers decided to make a significant change to the story’s ending.

The new Sony film, adapted from Colleen Hoover’s book of the same name and currently in theaters, tells the story of Lily Bloom (Blake Lively), a florist who falls in love with neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni). Their relationship quickly turns sinister when it becomes evident that Ryle is physically abusive.

Lily has spent her life determined not to end up in an abusive relationship because her mother was always abused by her father, yet chose to stay with him. This broke Lily in many ways, and she confided in her high school sweetheart Atlas (played by Alex Neustaedter as a teen and Brandon Sklenar as an adult) about it all.

When Lily unexpectedly runs into Atlas as an adult, he immediately recognizes the signs of abuse on her and begs Lily to leave Ryle and not to be like her mother. Lily desperately wants to believe that Ryle is good and that the violent incidents were truly accidents, so she stays.

However, Lily can’t deny what’s happening anymore after Ryle rapes her out of jealousy over Atlas. She immediately leaves and seeks out Atlas, who takes her to the hospital, where they learn Lily is pregnant from the assault. She decides to keep the baby, allowing Ryle to meet his daughter briefly before asking for a divorce.

This is where a significant divergence occurs. In the book, Lily permits Ryle to be a part of their daughter’s life, agreeing to co-parent with him. But in the movie, when Lily runs into Atlas again a few years later and he asks about Ryle, she notes that it’s “just the two of us,” indicating Ryle is out of the picture entirely.

Director Justin Baldoni and screenwriter Christy Hall initially considered not making this change.

“In the original draft, we had a scene in the epilogue where we see Ryle dropping off their child to Lily, and they have a short conversation,” Baldoni told TheWrap. “It was written to show that they’ve overcome a lot over the last two years.”

He continued, “And I wasn’t fully comfortable with it. No More wasn’t fully comfortable with it, and we were trying to find a way to make it work, to honor the book, but too much had to be done in such a short window to explain how they could possibly be co-parenting.”

Baldoni and his team thought about adding brief dialogue to show Ryle was in therapy or another means of indicating he was actively working on bettering himself. But as they prepared to shoot that version, Baldoni decided the most appropriate ending for Ryle would be to cut him off entirely after he met his baby girl Emerson — named for his brother — in the hospital.

“I don’t want to open up a can of worms and have a conversation about, you know, should a man like Ryle be allowed to co-parent? What’s an acceptable amount of work someone has to do in that situation?” Baldoni explained. “It was just way too much.”

The director also relied on actual statistics to support that decision, knowing that reform is very rarely what actually happens.

“The truth is, from our research and from our partners, we know that the majority of men go back to being abusers, and that’s the fact,” he said. “And then it didn’t feel right to tell a story about a man who was a minority in that, because that wouldn’t be honoring the original intention of why we were trying to tell the story.”

He continued, “So the best ending for Ryle was to look at his wife and kid, and the life that he could have had, the life that he blew up, and to walk out the door and for us not see him again. And that was, for me, what felt the best in adapting the book and turning it into a film, to say bye to him there.”

“It Ends With Us” is now in theaters everywhere.

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Source: TheWrap