Adaptation of the best-seller by Ali Hazelwoodthe film “The Love Hypothesis” got a premiere date on the Prime Video streaming service, in addition to the first images. The work stars Lili Reinhart (“Riverdale”) and Tom Bateman (“Death on the Nile”).
The film follows Olive (Reinhart), a brilliant doctoral candidate focused on her future in academia. When she realizes that her best friend Ahn (Rachel Marsh) fell in love with her crush Jeremy (Nicholas Duvernay), Olive impulsively kisses the intimidating professor Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman) to prove that he overcame his crush.
What starts as a desperate act of friendship turns into a fake relationship with rules, boundaries, and a mutually beneficial agreement. When their arrangement begins to blur the lines between act and reality, Olive is forced to test her scariest hypothesis yet: that love might actually be worth the risk.
“The Love Hypothesis” premieres September 23 on the platform.
Behind the Gossip of “The Love Hypothesis”
In 2025, it caused a buzz on social media among readers of the work, who noticed a somewhat (or not so) unusual coincidence. The actor cast to play the main role, Tom Bateman, would have actually been the one who inspired the author to write the work’s great villain.
Before being published, the book was written by Hazelwood as a “fanfic” — nothing less than a story created by fans based on characters and universes that already exist in books, films, series, among others — of the fictional relationship in the “Star Wars” saga between the characters Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Rey would be played by Olive and Kylo, Adam Carlsen.
At the time of the couple’s development in the saga’s films, explored in the trilogy that lasted from 2015 to 2019, fans theorized that the two actors even had an off-screen relationship. In 2017, however, Daisy Ridley began a relationship with Tom Bateman.
The book’s villain, in turn, is an abuser and has a name very similar to Ridley’s husband: Tom Benton.
Bateman’s name, chosen as the “good guy” of a story in which he originally inspired the villain, was what took social media by storm. However, no one, not even the author, commented on the matter.
The book went viral in the BookTok community on TikTok and was one of the best-selling titles at the 2025 Rio Book Biennial.
