How Colleen Hoover TOOK HOLLYWOOD

Is it too cheesy?” Colleen Hoover asks, pushing onto the hind legs of her chair, her blonde hair pulled up in her signature messy bun and her big eyes growing larger, as she considers a tagline for her forthcoming film, Reminders of Him. It’s mid-September and the prolific, bestselling author of 24 novels in 10 years is in the middle of a meeting to hammer out the film’s trailer, poster, and tagline with Vanessa Caswill, the film’s London-based director; Lauren Levine, Hoover’s producing partner and script cowriter; and Gina Matthews, a veteran Hollywood producer.

- BY KAYLA WEBLEY ADLER

Hoover on the set of Verity, a film adaptation of her 2018 novel, coming in 2026.

Reminders of Him, which will premiere in March from Universal, is one of several adaptations of Hoover’s books headed to the big screen, but it’s the first film that she has cowritten and coproduced. (She was also on set for all five months of filming and got to sit in during the editing process.) Today, it’s her focus, but yesterday, she was at Paramount Pictures, prepping an electronic press kit for Regretting You, which opened in theaters in October, starring Allison Williams and Dave Franco. Once she’s done with her work on Reminders of Him for the day, she'll return to her suite at the lush Hotel Bel-Air to watch a rough cut of another film, Verity, based on her 2018 novel and coming in October 2026 from Amazon MGM Studios, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. In the middle of it all, she’ll sneak in a lunch at The Aster, a hip private members' club and luxury boutique hotel in Los Angeles, with Levine to review the slate of movies and series they have in the works at the production company no one even knows they own, called Heartbones.

Having her own production company is “an opportunity to tell the stories you want to tell and have a bit of agency,” Hoover says over poutine nachos and strawberry margaritas. She was barely involved with the first film adaptation of one of her books, It Ends With Us, starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, which blew up fantastically in a tit-for-tat legal drama.

Suffice to say, she thought maybe she’d like to have a bit more control in the future. Hoover and Levine never publicly launched Heartbones Entertainment, a nod to her 2020 book