What’s the key to successfully marketing a movie in 2026? That’s a debate that people have a whole lot of opinions on, but in the case of “The Love Hypothesis,” a big piece of the answer was Lili Reinhart. More specifically, Lili Reinhart’s TikTok game.
The actress, who was also an executive producer on the romantic comedy movie about a student who fake-dates a prickly teacher but ends up falling in love, filmed various trends with her co-star Tom Bateman, often in costume while on set, and picked up tens of millions of views, quite literally overnight. The thing is, while TikTok is now a core part of most movie marketing campaigns, they usually come out after filming has wrapped. Reinhart took a swing.
“It just was this weird feeling I had where I thought, ‘You know what? If I’m doing a trend right now, it’s not going to be relevant in a year from now, so I’m going to post it right now,’” she explained to TheWrap. “And did I get a smack on the wrist a little bit at first? Yes. And then once it reached a certain number of views, the slap was taken away.”
It wasn’t just taken away. According to “The Love Hypothesis” producer Elizabeth Cantillon, Reinhart’s preemptive posting actually ended up being a job creator for the project.
“Because of Lili, we ended up with a guy embedded to shoot the TikToks right with us,” Cantillon told TheWrap. “We didn’t start out that way. But that person — and he was lovely — joined our crew, and he was shooting TikToks, and I’d never done that before.”
“I mean, I’d only worked on movie sets where you kept people out, right? You didn’t show stuff. You did a first look, and maybe it went to People Magazine or something, I don’t know, Entertainment Tonight. But now this was a whole different way of including an audience and fans in the process, and she really is smart at that, super smart.”
For her part, Reinhart will be the first to tell you that she’s not an expert. She joked that she was just “throwing s–t at the wall and hoping that it stuck,” given the algorithm’s unpredictable nature. She’s not even sure that she’ll try the technique again on another project, because “The Love Hypothesis” was “just a special one.”
“It just so happened to work really well, and I’m glad that I did it a year ago because I think it really helped build anticipation for the movie and get a lot of people to start reading the book before the movie, which is also amazing,” she said.
She’s not wrong. Director Claire Scanlon noted that one of Reinhart’s first posts — in which Bateman scoops her up with one arm while walking — exploded overnight, and was a bellwether that let everyone involved know that “The Love Hypothesis” was going to be a big deal.
@lilireinhart 💘 #thelovehypothesis ♬ All Night – Beyoncé
“She posted it that night, late at night, and the next morning she woke up to 57 million views, and we were all like, ‘Whoa!’” Scanlon recalled. “And I mean, I think we all, over the course, really appreciated the synergy between Lili and her following, and [author] Ali [Hazelwood] and her following, and then them coming together.”
“It kind of exploded, and it certainly made Amazon and everyone, MRC, take heed, and us as well, Elizabeth and myself. Like, ‘Whoa, we’ve got something here.’”
Really, very few people involved knew in advance just how big of a deal “The Love Hypothesis” was among readers, and thus how coveted the film adaptation would be. Most of them came to the book only after reading the script.
“I wish I could tell you that I was very canny and creative, and I was trolling BookTok or fanfiction sites. It’s not true,” Cantillon admitted.
Instead, it was sent to her by an agent at UTA in 2021, at a point in the pandemic when people were really getting into binge-reading along with their binge-watching. Cantillon recognized the potential immediately.
“It was so charming, and so funny, and so specific, and ‘voice-y,’ as they say,” she recalled. “I felt like I could hear Ali’s voice. And then other people wanted it too, so it was competitive. So I had to go persuade her to give it to me and not to somebody else, and then we bought it with MRC and then here we went. But I didn’t have all the pressure yet. The pressure came later.”
Scanlon saw the same potential Cantillon did, and it’s what drew her out of her typical lane of directing TV. She’d previously directed Netflix’s hit Glen Powell/Zoey Deutch rom-com “Set It Up,” as well as Prime Video’s “The People We Hate at the Wedding,” but has primarily spent the last few years working on series including “Abbott Elementary,” “Loot,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and several other fan favorites.
Her general barometer for agreeing to take on a film is simple: would she, as a fan, want to see that movie? More often than not, the answer is no.
“I’m very discerning because I just am, because I can be. Television is lovely, and it doesn’t require the same commitment that a movie does,” she explained. “I know how much that will take, I know I have to love it. Because you’re living it, you’re eating, sleeping, and breathing it for a year. There’s just no way around it, and you will be seeing it a million times. So you better love it.”
Fortunately, she loved “The Love Hypothesis,” and she was able to bring a few strategic habits of her own that she’s picked up from her time in TV. Chief among them is efficiency; according to the director she’s efficient “sometimes to a fault.”
She also noted that, working in TV, she gets to see a lot of actors across different projects, which directly resulted in Rachel Marsh getting cast in “The Love Hypothesis” as Anh. Scanlon and Marsh previously worked together on “Unstable.”
Between Scanlon’s directing savvy and Reinhart’s social media savvy, what followed is a rom-com adaptation that had fans at some screenings screaming so loud, Scanlon found herself thinking “this isn’t the Beatles, what’s going on here?”
“It’s taken me aback, for sure,” she admitted with a laugh.
“The Love Hypothesis” is now streaming on Prime Video.