BookTok’s favorite fake-dating romance has officially made the jump to the screen. The Love Hypothesis movie premiered on Prime Video on Tuesday, September 23, 2026, and is streaming now worldwide.
Lili Reinhart stars as Olive Smith, a driven Ph.D. candidate whose love life exists mostly in theory. To convince her best friend Anh that she has moved on from her crush Jeremy, Olive impulsively kisses Adam Carlsen, an intimidating professor played by Tom Bateman. What starts as a desperate act of friendship turns into a fake relationship with rules, boundaries, and a mutually beneficial agreement — until the line between performance and reality starts to blur, and Olive has to test her most daunting hypothesis yet: that love might actually be worth the risk.
Claire Scanlon, director of the hit rom-com Set It Up, helms the film from a screenplay by Sarah Rothschild, with Elizabeth Cantillon producing for Amazon MGM Studios and MRC. Rachel Marsh plays Anh, alongside Jaboukie Young-White as Malcolm, Nicholas Duvernay as Jeremy, and Arty Froushan as Tom. Reinhart also serves as a producer.
The road to the screen was a long one. Bisous Pictures optioned Hazelwood’s novel back in October 2022, Reinhart’s casting was announced in July 2025, and the supporting cast joined that August. Principal photography took place in Montreal in July and August 2025, standing in for the novel’s Stanford setting, and composer Laura Karpman reunited with Scanlon after Set It Up. The finished film runs 112 minutes.
The source material is a phenomenon in its own right. Hazelwood’s 2021 debut became a New York Times bestseller and a defining hit of the BookTok era — and it famously began as fan fiction about Star Wars’ Rey and Kylo Ren before being rewritten into an original story.
Early reactions suggest the wait paid off. Reviewers have singled out the chemistry between Reinhart and Bateman, and Yahoo Entertainment argues the film takes romance seriously enough to help save the rom-com itself. It lands in a busy year for the movies, too — from Paul Schrader making his next film with AI to the John Tuggle story coming to the big screen, 2026’s slate is proving anything but predictable.
The Love Hypothesis is streaming now exclusively on Prime Video, included with an Amazon Prime membership ($14.99 a month or $139 a year in the U.S.), with a 30-day free trial available for new members.
Sources:
Wikipedia – The Love Hypothesis (film)
About Amazon – How to watch The Love Hypothesis on Prime Video
Yahoo Entertainment – The Love Hypothesis Movie Review
Featured image: Lili Reinhart at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con International, photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
