Claire Scanlon, the director of The Love Hypothesis, has opened up about why she avoided scouring BookTok while making the film adaptation. The movie landed on Prime Video last week, and is based on Ali Hazelwood’s 2021 The Love Hypothesis novel, which itself started its life as Star Wars fanfiction about a romance between Rey and Kylo Ren. In the 2026 adaptation, Tom Bateman and Lili Reinhart portray the two leads, professor Dr. Adam Carlsen and PhD student Olive Smith. And while it’s received plenty of praise, fans of the novel haven’t held back when it came to the changes made to the original story – including the removal of Holden. Given just how protective its enormous BookTok fandom is over the original, you’d probably assume Scanlon spent months lurking through fan theories and figuring out exactly what readers wanted from the movie. In reality, she deliberately did the complete opposite. Why The Love Hypothesis director avoided BookTok Credit: Prime Video Appearing on the Off The Shelf podcast, host Morgann Book asked the filmmaker how far she went on BookTok or The Love Hypothesis fan spaces, to which she replied, “None of it. I just read the book.” But she actually believes this was a benefit when making the movie. Scanlon said if she’d known from the start just how much love there is for the novel, Ali Hazelwood and her wider work, “I would have been scared… Ignorance in that situation was to my benefit for sure.” And ultimately, when the producer sent her a script for The Love Hypothesis, she loved it. If she had gone straight onto BookTok, she might have never taken on the project. “That’s when she started to say words I did not understand, which were, ‘It’s based on a book that got very popular on BookTok, which is fanfiction from Star Wars.’ And I was like, ‘I understand none of what you just,’” Scanlon quipped. Even after reading the book, Scanlon explained that she didn’t treat it like her “Bible,” adding, “I read the book and I put it down.” “Once in a while I would go back and look at it for backstory or ideas or just for something as simple as the way that Adam always calls Olive ‘smartass’ – just little touchstones that you want to make sure are in the film and that you honour the book,” she continued. “But at the same time, you can’t do the whole book [or] it would have to be a TV series.” Scanlon also praised the writer Sarah Rothschild for treating the screenplay in the same way. “Sarah Rothschild did a wonderful cinematic adaptation of the book [and] kept some of the most iconic scenes, but then also truncated it and brought it into a world that’s visual as well as on the page,” she explained. But there was one part of the book she DID treat like a ‘Bible’ Credit: Prime Video Despite deliberately not treating the entire novel like a “Bible”, Scanlon said there was one major exception: the infamous chapter 16, which contains Olive and Adam’s much-talked-about hotel sex scene. “The sunscreen scene and then, of course, chapter 16. That’s the one chapter that I probably did use as a Bible going back and forth,” she revealed. But even then, the movie version is a lot less steamy. And the filmmaker admitted, “I just knew the pressure for that and also how it could never fully live up to it because that’s someone’s imagination and everyone’s different.” Scanlon also pointed out that the scene actually stretches across more than one chapter in the book, meaning it inevitably had to be shortened for the screen. “You can only do so much before it starts getting weird,” she joked. “Like the rest of the book, we shorten things. So, just to make it a visual medium and make it cinematic, it’s definitely not as long as an entire chapter.” For all the latest film and TV updates and hot takes, like our Facebook page. Featured image credit: Berkley Books/Prime Video Post navigation Next story
