Hypothetically, Reylo lives. Following its Prime Video debut last week, The Love Hypothesis, the latest in a steady stream of franchise fan fiction with a few names and situations swapped for something less copyrighted, already has a book and film sequel on the way. In the words of Luke Skywalker, whom, for legal reasons, the characters Olive and Adam do not know, no one’s ever really gone.
Ali Hazelwood’s best-seller, The Love Hypothesis, started as a popular Star Wars fan fiction about the romance between Rey Skywalker and her murderous, gaslighting will-they-won’t-they partner Kylo Ren. In 2021, Hazelwood, a neuroscience professor, turned some specifics of her popular fan fiction into a blockbuster novel, The Love Hypothesis. Now she’s begun work on a sequel, entitled The Two-Body Problem, with producers MRC developing a new film adaptation before the book’s release.
“‘I wrote a sequel to The Love Hypothesis‘ is not a sentence I thought I’d say a year or so ago, but now I weirdly can’t imagine a world in which The Two-Body Problem doesn’t exist,” Hazelwood writes. “I’m really eager to talk more about this book and how it came about in the next few months. For now let me just say that the TLH movie and its cast made me fall for Adam and Olive all over again, that revisiting them was an absolute pleasure.”
Hazelwood, who is clearly very in touch with her fanbase, offers a quasi-apology for “blindsiding” them with a sequel announcement. “As someone who gets VERY attached to stories and characters, I know that unannounced sequels can be blindsiding, so feel free to skip this book and overwrite it with whatever headcanon you prefer, and I’ll see you on the next one! But if you want to read more about Adam and Olive, The Two-Body Problem spans a couple of years, and it’s a mix of slice of life, postdoctoral turmoil, and unflinching exploration of the hardest challenge one will face in a long-term relationship: deciding what to have for dinner. If you pick it up, I really hope you enjoy.” Hazelwood also shared that MRC, which produced Love Hypothesis, was developing a film, but “nothing is guaranteed.”
The fan-fiction-to-hit-romance-novel pipeline is churning hits out more and more these days. More than a decade after the Twilight fan-fiction, Fifty Shades Of Grey, tied America’s horniest readers up in words, Heated Rivalry, based on the unexplored romance of Avengers Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, became a television smash. It just goes to show that if Hollywood is going to suck the sex out of their blockbuster movies, fans are going to find a way to get their favorite characters kissing as George Lucas intended.
The Two-Body Problem hits bookstores on February 2, 2027.
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