And if that wasn’t enough to get your heart rate up, the studio has attached none other than It Ends With Us author and romance powerhouse Colleen Hoover to produce the adaptation under her Heartbones Entertainment banner alongside partner Lauren Levine.
The Blueprint: Fake Dating and Academic Feuds
For those who haven’t yet devoured the 2023 novel, Love, Theoretically is a delightfully chaotic STEM romance. The story follows Elsie Hannaway, a weary adjunct theoretical physicist who supplements her abysmal teaching salary by working as a fake girlfriend for hire.
Her carefully compartmentalized lives collide when she meets Jack Smith, a notoriously cold, devastatingly handsome experimental physicist who happens to be the older brother of her favorite client. To make matters worse, Jack is the exact man who once ruined her mentor’s academic career—and he sits on the hiring committee for her dream job at MIT. Cue the academic warfare, hidden identities, and inevitable, sizzling chemistry.
To bring this witty script to life, Amazon has hired Sofia Alvarez, the filmmaker who beautifully adapted Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You for Netflix. Alvarez is set to direct and pen the screenplay.
A Hazelwood Double-Feature: Amazon is clearly all-in on the Ali Hazelwood universe. This announcement comes just as anticipation peaks for the September 23 premiere of The Love Hypothesis on Prime Video, starring Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman.
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The Colleen Hoover Factor
Hoover’s involvement as a producer has already set social media ablaze, proving she remains one of the most polarizing yet undeniably influential names in modern publishing. While some fans on platforms like X and Reddit are fiercely protective of Hazelwood’s lighter tone, others see Hoover’s backing as a massive win for ensuring romance adaptations get serious blockbuster budgets in Hollywood.
Hoover is keeping incredibly busy at Amazon MGM Studios. Aside from Love, Theoretically, her Heartbones banner is deep in development on the highly anticipated cinematic adaptation of her own psychological thriller, Verity, starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett, which is locked in for an October theatrical release.
The Year Romance Took Over the Screen
If you feel like your entire Goodreads reading list is migrating to streaming platforms, you aren’t imagining things. This year has officially become a golden era for book-to-screen love stories. Here are a few other massive romance novels that have secured major production deals or hit screens:
- People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry: This beloved friends-to-lovers contemporary romance kicked off the year with a highly anticipated Netflix film treatment.
- Off-Campus Series by Elle Kennedy: Prime Video turned this smash-hit hockey romance universe into a glossy, addictive “college soap” style TV series. The first season, adapting the mega-popular book The Deal, premiered to rave reviews from the “book girlies” in May.
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- Twisted Series by Ana Huang: Netflix officially locked down a deal to turn this dark, high-stakes billionaire romance blueprint into an interconnected anthology series, with plans for each book to get its own drama-filled season.
- Reminders of Him by Colleen Hoover: Universal brought this emotional story of grief, redemption, and forbidden second-chances to theaters earlier this spring, making it a stellar year for Hoover’s cinematic empire.
Whether you prefer the sweet banter of a physics lab or the high drama of a billionaire’s penthouse, Hollywood is finally giving the romance genre the respect—and the budget—it deserves.
