On August 14, sources told TMZ that Lively’s discomfort allegedly stemmed from a scene in which Baldoni’s character Ryle lifts her character Lily into the air. According to the tabloid’s anonymous sources, “Justin has a history of back problems and before lifting Blake, he went to his on-set trainer and asked how much she weighed and how could he train to protect his back from injury.” Sources also claim that Lively took issue with how long Baldoni allegedly lingered during a kissing scene between the two of them.
Dueling Versions of It Ends With Us Reportedly Exist
Both Baldoni and Lively have nodded toward creative differences during the production. Baldoni argued that “there’s always friction that happens when you make a movie like this,” telling ELLE UK, “It’s that friction, I believe, that creates beautiful art.” Meanwhile, Lively told Hits Radio UK that she had to fight for the inclusion of Lana Del Rey’s “Cherry” in the final cut. “They begged me to take that song out of the movie,” she said, adding, “I’m not supposed to be talking about this. They felt like it was too charged and heavy.”
Lively also raised eyebrows by telling E! News at the It Ends With Us premiere that her husband Ryan Reynolds wrote her and Baldoni’s characters’ meet-cute scene. “The iconic rooftop scene, my husband actually wrote it. Nobody knows that but you now,” she said at the time. The film’s actual credited screenwriter, Christy Hall, said she wasn’t aware that Reynolds had contributed dialogue to the sequence. “There were a few little flourishes that I did not write, but I assumed that they had been improvised on set,” Hall told People. “But, again, like I said, the moments that I felt like needed to be honored are there. So I recognize the scene and I’m proud of the scene. And if those flourishes came from Ryan, I think that’s wonderful.”
What emerged from alleged discomfort and disagreement on set was a “fracture among the filmmakers” during the post-production process as two “different cuts of the movie emerged,” sources told The Hollywood Reporter. Lively, who was a producer on the film, reportedly commissioned her own cut of the film from the film’s additional editor Shane Reid, a frequent collaborator with the actor and her husband. Reid was also the editor on Reynolds’s Deadpool & Wolverine, as well as Taylor Swift’s “I Bet You Think About Me” music video, which Lively directed.
