Reminders of Him Is the Movie Nobody Needed — But Everyone's Watching Anyway
Another Colleen Hoover adaptation, another round of manufactured tears. Reminders of Him opened to $18 million, critics are split at 55%, and audiences are eating it up at 89%. Here's why both sides are wrong.
Look, I'm going to say what everyone is thinking but nobody wants to type into their Letterboxd review: Reminders of Him is a movie that exists purely because It Ends with Us made $350 million. That's it. That's the creative justification.
And honestly? I don't even blame the studio. I blame us.
The Colleen Hoover Machine
We're now three adaptations deep into the Hoover Cinematic Universe, and the formula hasn't changed: take a conventionally attractive cast, throw them into a situation that oscillates between soap opera and Lifetime movie, add one devastating plot twist that exists solely to make you cry in public, and release it on a Friday so BookTok can post their theater reaction videos by Saturday morning.
Reminders of Him follows Kenna (Maika Monroe) — a woman who served seven years in prison after a car crash killed her boyfriend — as she returns home to reconnect with the daughter she's never known. Her dead boyfriend's parents won't let her near the kid. She falls for a local bar owner, a former NFL player played by Tyriq Withers. Drama ensues. Tears are shed. The audience score hits 89%.
Here's the thing: Maika Monroe is genuinely great in this. The New York Times called her work "stupendous," and they're not wrong. Monroe has proven herself one of the most watchable actors of her generation — from Longlegs to this, she commits fully to every role she takes.
But a great performance doesn't save a broken story.
The Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
The romance at the center of this film makes zero sense. I'm not being contrarian for the sake of it — the critics at Deadline literally called the logic "ludicrous." You have a woman fresh out of prison for a vehicular manslaughter conviction who immediately enters a secret relationship with a man connected to her dead boyfriend's family. In what universe does any adult make these choices?
Roger Ebert's site nailed it: the film is "so preoccupied with tragedy that the romance becomes secondary." And that's the fatal flaw. The movie wants you to root for a love story that it never bothers to earn. Instead, it banks on the assumption that if you've read the book, you've already done the emotional homework. If you haven't? Good luck.
Variety was kinder, calling it "restrained" — which in critic-speak means "not as melodramatic as we expected from a Hoover adaptation." But restrained isn't the same as good. It just means the bar was already on the floor.
The Real Hot Take
Here's where I'm going to lose some of you.
Reminders of Him isn't terrible. It's worse than terrible — it's adequate. It's a competently made film with a strong lead performance that will make a bunch of money, get forgotten by June, and then show up on Netflix where it'll trend for one weekend before disappearing into the algorithm.
That 55% critics score and 89% audience split tells you everything. The people who wanted to cry got what they came for. The people who wanted a good movie... didn't. Both groups are technically right. But we keep rewarding this exact formula, and studios keep serving it back to us with a different title and a different cast.
$18 million opening. $33 million in 10 days. On a $25 million budget, this is already profitable.
So here's my question: if we keep paying for adequate, why would Hollywood ever give us anything better?
The Bottom Line
Go see Reminders of Him if you want a solid cry and two hours of Maika Monroe doing her thing. Skip it if you want a romance that respects your intelligence. Either way, it doesn't matter — the next Hoover adaptation is probably already in pre-production.
I said what I said.
Related title: Reminders of Him