Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds are no longer actors – they’re influencers

It Ends with Us wants to sell you something. The new and inappropriately gorgeous domestic violence movie is, I guess, about a young woman trapped in a cycle of abuse and haunted by memories of the hunky homeless boy she loved and lost. But it is also a movie primarily about aesthetics – the immaculate hair of its leading lady Blake Lively; the cosy, Pinterest-ready flower shop her character owns; the adorably ramshackle book of illustrations she ties together with twine; the Taylor Swift ballad that soundtracks her moment of realisation. It is Instagram Story: The Movie. An Amazon.com landing page with plot and dialogue. And it’s all yours, too, for the right price.

Before It Ends with Us, Lively, an often underrated actor, hadn’t made a movie in four years. But in that time she has fully embraced a new kind of superstardom, wherein a creative project isn’t just a creative project but a merchandising opportunity, one synergised for maximum profitability with a host of other business endeavours. Call it The Swift Effect. Its ethos: Why bother selling one thing when you can sell six or seven all at once?

Alongside her new movie, Lively has launched a haircare line, Blake Brown, and continued to plug her two drinks labels, Betty Booze and Betty Buzz. Her husband Ryan Reynolds has also been a regular on the It Ends with Us circuit, filming promotional skits for Lively’s Instagram page, and joining her at the film’s New York premiere with his Deadpool & Wolverine co-star Hugh Jackman, who appears with Lively in her new photo-spread for Vogue. A Deadpool mask covered in It Ends with Us-inspired floral patterns was glimpsed in a recent Lively grid-post, just to drive home the synergy between both otherwise wildly disparate projects, which are currently sitting at number one and number two at the US box office. Think of it as Barbenheimer for Hello! subscribers, and one of the most insidious and depressing developments in modern Hollywood.

By now, we should be used to celebrities plugging both their films and their side hustles, and sometimes at the same time. From Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson to Dwayne Johnson and Matthew McConaughey, it’s tricky to find a major A-lister who doesn’t have their own lifestyle/skincare/alcohol brand, or at least a fashion house they’re signed up to endorse. But Lively and Reynolds feel like representatives of a new dawn in A-list self-promotion. They operate as a unit, their marriage and family a key component of their personal brands, and regularly blur the lines between their film work and their moguldom. Deadpool & Wolverine features not just a cameo from Lively but two of the couple’s young children, as well as players from Wrexham AFC, the Welsh football team bought by Reynolds and actor Rob McElhenney in 2020.

Lively has boasted about Reynolds re-writing whole scenes of the It Ends with Us script – something the film’s credited screenwriter Christy Hall didn’t know until she was asked about it on the red carpet – while Betty Buzz released a collection of It Ends with Us-themed cocktail recipes that featured both Lively’s beverage brands and Reynolds’s Aviation Gin. That brand, meanwhile, has been referenced in 6 Underground, Red Notice and Deadpool 2, three of Reynolds’s most recent action films. (Lively’s character in her 2018 thriller A Simple Favor also drank Aviation Gin… argh.)

It results in work that feels like one big capitalist love-in to which we aren’t invited. We may gawk, however, if we pay enough money for the pleasure. As of right now, it’s an approach that’s also got Lively into a bit of hot water. Venture onto her Instagram and you will currently find hundreds of angry comments suggesting that Lively has misread the room when it comes to It Ends with Us. The film is about a woman fleeing a marriage to a volatile and abusive man, and many fans have wondered if the commercial tie-ins feel misplaced. Her themed cocktails, for instance, included one called the “Ryle You Wait” – named after the character in the film who, um, throws her down the stairs.

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This has also intersected with rumours of discord on the It Ends with Us set, with its director Justin Baldoni – who additionally portrays Lively’s abuser in the film – conspicuously absent from group promotion of the film. All of the major players involved in it seem to have unfollowed him on social media, too. Neither Baldoni nor Lively have commented on the rumours of a feud, but there does appear to be a split between both parties in terms of how the movie is being promoted. Lively has led an upbeat promo cycle focused on flowery fashions and the love story angle of the film (the swole hobo grows up to be a sensitive chef played by actor Brandon Sklenar, who seems like an AI composite of Glen Powell, Matthew Rhys and a handful of Hemsworths). Baldoni, meanwhile, has used his solo press run to discuss domestic violence and the nature of toxic relationships. It’s almost as if they’ve been talking up two different films.

What is most bothersome about this new wave of multi-tiered brand promotion, though, is how easy it is for the stars themselves to be caught adrift in it. Reynolds has long abandoned any attempts to be a real actor, happy to coast on smart-alec quippery whether he’s playing a character on film or simply being himself. Lively, though, is more of a loss. Before her hiatus from movies, she’d revealed herself to be an actor of admirable range, and a real 24-carat film star – her strongest roles bask in her innate allure, that ineffable quality that draws people in.

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Think of how little she actually appears in A Simple Favor as an outrageously styled dream-mom with secrets, but how much the film hinges on her innate pull. Think, too, of the doomed glamour she radiates in the underrated romantic drama The Age of Adaline, where she played a woman cursed to forever look 29. Or how naturally she held the screen in the action thriller The Shallows, her only co-stars a friendly seagull and a hungry shark. And Gossip Girl, her star-making teen drama, only worked because you truly bought that all of New York would be dazzled by her.

There are glimpses of Lively’s brilliance in It Ends with Us. In its best moments, the film settles down and feels guided by her performance – its melancholy and regret, its creeping epiphanies. But too often her work is thrown off by the sheer noise that surrounds her, from her insane costuming and the exhausting close-ups of her hair to the near-constant reminders that you’re actually watching an advert for something else entirely.

Fundamentally, this can’t be the future of Hollywood – our best movie stars treating filmmaking as one quadrant of a wider business plan. Ryan Reynolds should be the anomaly, and certainly not the blueprint.