This Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni feud is turning into total Hollywood grotesquerie. I still believe this all has to do with who gets to nab the rights to the ‘It Ends With Us’ sequel, which Baldoni currently owns.
Last night, Lively made good on her original threat, which was initially just a complaint, and ended up suing Baldoni for sexual harassment and launching a smear campaign against her. This was to be expected, and I suspect the end goal is a settlement (sequel rights).
Meanwhile, Baldoni filed a $250 million lawsuit against the New York Times, suing the newspaper for “libel and false light invasion of privacy” over the Dec. 21 article titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” The claim is that the Times relied on “‘cherry-picked,” unverified and altered communications that were used to form a “self-serving” narrative, and ignored an “abundance of evidence” that would have contradicted Lively’s claims.
Attorney, Bryan Freedman, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Baldoni and other plaintiffs, tells Variety that the Times “cowered to the wants and whims of two ‘untouchable’ Hollywood elites [Lively and Ryan Reynolds]” Furthermore, according to the suit, Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, inappropriately butted heads with Baldoni by verbally harassing him in a meeting during which he accused Baldoni of “fat shaming’” his wife. A Sony exec who was in attendance at this meeting states that Reynolds’ tirade was unlike anything he’d seen before in his 40-year career.
Now, for the good stuff. Actual info on the moviemaking part of it all.
Back in August, TheInSneider reported that there were competing cuts of “It Ends With Us.” Apparently, Lively took over Baldoni’s edit despite his cut having scored higher with audiences. How did Lively get away with this? Well, for one thing, she has a powerful husband, Reynolds, aka Deadpool himself, who “basically took over the movie and buddied up to author Colleen Hoover to see that their cut won.”
Due to the evidence submitted in Baldoni’s suit, the original report has turned out to be accurate. Yes, Baldoni, the director, wasn’t allowed to see Lively’s final cut of HIS OWN film. Lively persuaded Sony to shut him out completely. Imagine being iced out of your own project. The texts reveal that Baldoni’s team was out there saying “we’ll take the high road” while allegedly being banned from seeing edits of his own movie.
In another email exchange, Baldoni gets asked by his editor if, despite Lively’s version having been released in theaters, they should continue working on their own cut of the film:
We didn’t even finish our director’s cut because she intervened. So, ideally, at some point we can take a week and just do it together for ourselves.
Baldoni’s lawsuit additionally mentions that Ryan Reynolds rewrote parts of the script without his knowledge and that he only found that out when Lively casually admitted it during a red-carpet interview. Baldoni thought the scenes had been ad libbed by Lively. Imagine finding out your lead actress’ lines were ghostwritten by her husband (which is a SAG violation). Not just that, she allegedly ran her own production schedule, rewrote her lines and other characters’ on the fly. Daily. The lawsuit claims this caused on-set chaos as entire scenes were delayed, and budgets got stretched.
Baldoni has directed two other movies in his career, 2019’s “Five Feet Apart” and 2020’s “Clouds.” He’s best known for his role in the CW series, “Jane the Vigin.” Unlike his career, this isn’t the last we hear about the on and off set chaos in making “It Ends With Us.”
