The other day, I saw a trailer for a new movie called “Reminders of Him” (it debuts in March), which was adapted from a novel of the same title by Colleen Hoover. Along with “It Ends with Us” (August 2024), “Regretting You” (October 2025) and “Verity” (October 2026), this will be the fourth Hoover movie adaptation in recent years.
Hoover, 46, writes young adult romance books, sometimes venturing into thrillers. However, her romance tends to involve darker themes such as domestic abuse, grief and addiction to create complexity within her characters. Her books became extremely popular back in late 2020 to 2021 because of BookTok, a community on TikTok focused on book reviews.
The rise of BookTok has led to a surge in popularity for reading, even boosting physical book sales. On the surface, this may seem like a positive development, but looking deeper, social media hasn’t taken the best approach to reading, and instead hyperfixates on tropes.
Tropes are character archetypes or plot devices such as enemies-to-lovers or love triangles. The nature of TikTok encourages hot trends and eye-catching books that capture attention quickly. If you look at the most popular books on BookTok, they tend to be formulaic, surface-level books. Authors may also feel pressured to emulate these plots in an effort to to sell well.
Because of this, much of the literature that we analyze in English class would be a dud on TikTok. Dopamine spikes from short-form media are ruining attention spans, causing people to lose the focus necessary for the depth and complexity of these novels.
This goes for Hoover’s books as well. Her writing style is underwhelming and her plots are often weak, glossing over key details to achieve certain results.
She even has gotten backlash for her romanticism of abuse in books like “It Ends with Us” and “November 9.” But while many of her books have heavy themes, they have gained traction on TikTok for being addictive, emotional and easy to read.
In full candor, I, too, read Colleen Hoover’s books when they came out to ride on the wave of their popularity, and I enjoyed them. But I haven’t seen any of the movies, and I’m not sure I want to.
In recent years, more and more BookTok-viral stories are getting movie adaptations. Books that get popular on TikTok raise large fanbases that filmmakers are confident will help the movie adaptations sell well.
The trend of Hoover’s books being turned into movie adaptations shows changes in the entertainment industry, gearing more toward content driven by fanbases. Entertainment companies are paying more attention to social media, allowing fans to influence creative decisions, like fan-casting, where fans discuss which actors they want to be casted for the main roles.
The result of this movement is that writers will have to become more mainstream and predictable to succeed. And we’ll all be worse off with entertainment that no longer stimulates intelligent thinking and creativity.
