The Love Hypothesis Movie Has Found Its Cast

It’s time to swoon for STEM.

On July 16, Lili Reinhart announced that she will star in and executive produce The Love Hypothesis movie — an adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s best-selling novel of the same name. It follows the fake relationship between Olive, a third-year Ph.D. candidate, and Adam, a professor and “reigning lab tyrant.” Over the course of the book, of course, their experiment gets a little too real.

So, who will be joining Reinhart — and when? Here are all the updates about The Love Hypothesis movie so far.

What Is The Love Hypothesis About?

While you may know the premise of The Love Hypothesis, you might not be aware that it originated as fan fiction on the website Archive of Our Own (AO3). Hazelwood was inspired by the Star Wars characters Rey and Kylo Ren — aka #Reylo — and set them in an AU (alternate universe) university setting.

Naturally, Hazelwood retooled her work to make it the straightforward love story — sans galactic characters — that would ultimately become The Love Hypothesis. But the tropes are universal, even for those who never hopped on the Reylo bandwagon. As Hazelwood shared on the Friends of the Force podcast in 2021, “There is the pining, the idea of soulmates, the idea that there are these two really competent, really smart, really powerful people who are very alone and very isolated for different reasons and can kind of only understand each other. And no one else really can understand them.”

Meet The Cast

Here’s where it gets a little meta. On July 17, Tom Bateman officially joined the cast. Reinhart even shared a clip of him on campus, where the pair did the TikTok trend set to “Illegal” by PinkPantheress.

Bateman just so happens to be the real-life husband of Daisy Ridley, who played Rey in the Star Wars films — a connection that shocked and delighted fans online.

The film will be directed by Claire Scanlon, who also helmed the delightful Netflix rom-com Set It Up.

Is There A Release Date Timeline?

While the setting of The Love Hypothesis makes it perfect for back-to-school season, it seems to have just begun filming if the cast’s campus TikTok is any indication. So, a release date hasn’t been announced yet.

But for potential reference, another Amazon MGM Studios adaptation, The Idea of You, began filming in October 2022 and premiered at South by Southwest (SXSW) in March 2024. If The Love Hypothesis follows a similar trajectory, it could theoretically premiere by late 2026.

Fortunately, given Reinhart’s social media so far, there may well be exciting updates from set in the meantime. She just shared a TikTok highlighting a dreamy line from Adam in the book: “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”