Entertainment

The Love Hypothesis lands on Prime Video with friendship in focus

Jonah VillalbaPublished 2w ago2 min readBased on 7 sources
The Love Hypothesis lands on Prime Video with friendship in focus
Photo by Dominick D / CC BY-SA 2.0

The fake-dating pact at the centre of The Love Hypothesis reaches the screen on Sept. 23 on Prime Video.

The film adapts Ali Hazelwood's 2021 bestseller, with Lili Reinhart as Olive Smith and Tom Bateman as Dr. Adam Carlsen, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Olive is a Stanford Ph.D. candidate and graduate student. Adam is a professor. Their plan is simple on paper. Pretend to date.

The reason is friendship. Olive agrees to the scheme to help her best friend Anh pursue Jeremy, played by Rachel Marsh and Nicholas Duvernay respectively. Reinhart described it in the Reporter's Beyond the Book interview as a story about two friends and what Olive will do for Anh. The backstory stays close to the novel. Olive lost her mother to pancreatic cancer when she was 15.

Claire Scanlon directed the adaptation. Elizabeth Cantillon is a producer, and Reinhart is also an executive producer, a senior credit that usually includes creative input and a share of profits. The studio behind the project is Amazon MGM Studios, which Deadline reported when the casting was announced in July 2025. Reinhart was set first as the lead, with Bateman cast opposite her a day later.

Scanlon, Reinhart, Marsh and Cantillon spoke together for the Reporter's feature, published Sept. 23. Friendship led the conversation. Scanlon said what drew her to the project was the female friendships and support. The group discussed putting friendship and science, technology, engineering and maths centre stage, rather than treating the lab as background.

The rollout has been steady. The Hollywood Reporter published first-look photos alongside the Sept. 23 release date in June. A teaser followed later that month, with the official trailer arriving in August. Marsh was also featured in the Reporter's Next Big Thing series on Sept. 18.

For fans, this means a short wait is over. The adaptation keeps the core quartet intact. It keeps the campus setting and the experiment that starts as a favour and turns complicated.

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