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An Amazon Prime Video adaptation of a Star Wars-inspired fan fiction has landed an impressive Rotten Tomatoes score.
Ali Hazelwood’s best-selling 2021 novel The Love Hypothesis began as Head Over Feet, a fan fiction inspired by the romantic connection between Star Wars characters Rey and Kylo Ren, known by the “shipping” name Reylo. (Shipping is when fandoms imagine or support a romantic pairing between two characters or people.)
The Love Hypothesis follows Lili Reinhart’s Olive, an ambitious Ph.D. student who enters a fake relationship with her department’s strict professor Adam Carlsen, played by Tom Bateman, to prove that she’s moved on from her crush.
The movie debuted at 88 percent on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, and currently stands at 76 percent based on 34 reviews, with 78 percent on the popcornmeter from more than 100 ratings.
The series has been well received by some critics, though reviews have been mixed.
Belen Edwards’s review in Mashable said the adaptation is “a bubbly blast that’ll have your insides fizzing.”
Edwards remarked that the film is “missing one key ingredient that would truly make its experiment stick the landing: yearning.”
Liz Declan at Screen Rant gave a more negative review, awarding the movie a 4/10 rating. Declan also highlighted a lack of chemistry between Reinhart and Bateman, arguing that the movie suffers from a “clunky awkwardness of its origins, and one half of the polar opposite, fake-dating lovebirds never felt 100 percent right.”
The Guardian’s Adrian Horton awarded the movie two stars, arguing that Reinhart did most of the heavy lifting on screen. “Reinhart remains the film’s ace through its many tonal stops and starts, from relatively molehill-sized conflicts to an abrupt swing toward the comically evil (perhaps a holdover from the novel’s roots as Star Wars fan fiction),” wrote the critic.
Hazelwood’s was a New York Times best-selling novel and was also a hit on BookTok, a community of readers on TikTok.
On social media, reactions between fans have been divided, with some Reddit users criticizing the pacing of the movie and the scene selection.
“Felt so sped up personally didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected and hope for it…Coming from someone who read the book they literally missed out one of the characters who played important role in the book was Holden; they could’ve made it in series rather a movie I would say rating it 6.5/10 for me [sic],” said one Reddit user.
Another person added: “I’m so disappointed. They did not include the YEARNING!!! Chapter 16 was my favorite but they didn’t even show the tension between Olive and Adam. Anh is such a Vietnamese name and they made her Filipino… at least change the name!”
However, others were left fawning over the adaptation.
“Thank you lili reinhart and tom bateman for giving us a good kissing scene in a romcom where it actually felt like the characters wanted to f*** each other,” wrote one fan on X.
“i’ll rarely ever say this about a book adaptation but the love hypothesis adaptation was way better than the book,” wrote another.
