Every Colleen Hoover Book-to-Screen Adaptation, Ranked

Colleen Hoover’s novels have gone from BookTok juggernauts to Hollywood catnip remarkably quickly. Four feature adaptations have now reached audiences, and they could hardly be more different: one became a major commercial hit, another leaned into unabashed romantic melodrama, while Verity has just pushed Hoover’s screen universe into something considerably nastier. For this ranking, only released feature adaptations qualify.

Placement considers critical reception, audience response, performances, fidelity where it benefits the movie, and whether the adaptation can survive without its bestselling cover sitting beside it.

4 Regretting You Never Finds Its Edge

Credit:- Paramount Pictures

Josh Boone’s Regretting You adapts Hoover’s 2019 novel about Morgan Grant and her teenage daughter Clara, whose already strained relationship fractures further after a devastating accident exposes family secrets. Allison Williams and Mckenna Grace play the mother-daughter pair, with Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Scott Eastwood, and Willa Fitzgerald completing the principal ensemble.

Hoover’s setup contains grief, betrayal, buried desire, adolescent romance, and enough combustible family history for a proper emotional brawl, yet the film frequently sands those edges down. Critics were particularly unconvinced. Regretting You currently carries 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, while audiences were substantially kinder at 83%. FandomWire’s Regretting You review similarly found the adaptation overstuffed and emotionally synthetic despite its talented cast. 

3 It Ends with Us Became a Juggernaut

Blake Lively in a still from It Ends with Us. | Credit: Sony Pictures Releasing.

Whatever one thinks of It Ends with Us, calling it unsuccessful would require creative arithmetic. Blake Lively stars as Lily Bloom opposite Justin Baldoni’s Ryle Kincaid and Brandon Sklenar’s Atlas Corrigan in Hoover’s story about romance curdling into domestic abuse. Commercially, it detonated. The movie earned more than $350 million worldwide against a reported $25 million production budget, according to Box Office Mojo. It currently holds 55% from critics but 89% from verified audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, suggesting Hoover’s enormous readership connected more enthusiastically with the adaptation than reviewers did.

Hoover has explained that Lily’s story was deeply personal. She told TODAY that the novel drew inspiration from her mother’s experience leaving an abusive relationship.

2 Reminders of Him Gets the Tears Right

Credit: Universal Pictures

Reminders of Him takes one of Hoover’s most emotionally punishing premises and, crucially, doesn’t strangle it with embellishment. Maika Monroe plays Kenna Rowan, a woman released from prison after serving five years for an accident that killed her boyfriend. She returns hoping to reconnect with the daughter she has never known, only to encounter hostility from almost everyone connected to the child’s life. Tyriq Withers co-stars as Ledger Ward.

The adaptation benefits enormously from Monroe, whose performance refuses to make Kenna’s grief tidy or saintly. Hoover had unusually direct creative control here. She co-wrote the screenplay with Lauren Levine and produced through her company Heartbones Entertainment, giving the author a hand in translating her own material rather than watching from the sidelines. Universal confirms Hoover’s screenplay and producing credits. 

FandomWire’s Reminders of Him review praised Monroe’s commitment while finding the film emotionally effective despite familiar romantic-drama machinery. Its restraint gives it the edge over It Ends with Us. The movie understands that forgiveness is far more interesting when nobody is automatically entitled to receive it.

1 Verity Finally Lets Hoover Get Nasty

Credit:- Amazon MGM Studios

Verity takes first place because it is the least interested in behaving like the stereotypical Colleen Hoover adaptation. Dakota Johnson plays struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh, who is hired to complete a bestselling series after its author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), becomes incapacitated. Lowen moves into the Crawford home, grows dangerously close to Verity’s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), and discovers a manuscript containing allegations capable of poisoning everything around them.

Michael Showalter’s adaptation has divided critics, but the friction is part of its appeal. Instead of tasteful prestige treatment, Verity embraces erotic melodrama, psychological manipulation, and camp. FandomWire’s Verity review calls it a “competent, campy thriller,” arguing that Showalter extracts entertaining pulp from material that could easily have become inert on screen. More importantly, the movie refuses to solve its central moral riddle neatly. 

Hollywood is nowhere near finished raiding Hoover’s bookshelf. All Your Perfects is among the projects moving through development, while several other Hoover novels have been optioned as studios chase the readership that helped turn It Ends with Us into a $350 million-plus theatrical hit. For now, Verity takes the crown, while Reminders of Him comes closest to translating Hoover’s emotional appeal without drowning in it.

Which Colleen Hoover adaptation got the book-to-screen leap right, and which novel should Hollywood tackle next? Tell us your ranking in the comments and follow FandomWire for more rankings, reviews, recaps, and ending explanations.