The originally self-published writer has conquered the book world—now she’s eyeing the big screen
Having taken the publishing industry by storm, Colleen Hoover is now setting her sights on Hollywood. In 2023, Hoover and film veteran Lauren Levine launched their production company Heartbones Entertainment with an eye to adapting Hoover’s blockbuster novels. So far, the studio has put out three feature films based on Hoover’s books, with a series currently in the works. But the duo sees Hoover’s own work as merely a jumping-off point for Heartbones, which they hope to grow into a major industry player.
Levine had been producing kids’ and family movies for nearly 15 years when she discovered Hoover’s work. At that point, she was tired of the wholesome source material she had made a career out of adapting. “When a friend asked what I was going to do next, I said, ‘I just want to have sex and kill people,’ ” she recalls. In 2015, Awesomeness TV, a now-defunct digital media and entertainment network that has since merged with Paramount Skydance, reached out to Levine in search of a series that would appeal to millennial mothers. Levine suggested Hoover’s novel Confess.
When Levine brought in Hoover to consult on Confess, the two became close. “When she told me she wanted to be more involved in her adaptations, partnering up felt completely organic,” Levine says.
Their similar aims convinced Hoover they should team up. “Lauren and I wanted to develop projects ourselves rather than only selling the rights and waiting to see what happened,” she says. “Heartbones gave us a way to be involved earlier and help shape the adaptations as they came together.”
The studio’s name borrows from Hoover’s novel Heart Bones, which Levine says “describes us and the stories we love: a little bit squishy, a little bit knuckly.”
The success of the 2024 film adaptation of It Ends with Us, which Hoover produced alongside Sony and director Justin Baldoni’s production company, proved to Hoover and Levine that Hoover’s books could be box office gold. The movie is based on Hoover’s breakout 2016 novel, published by Atria, which has sold more than six million print copies, according to Circana Bookscan. Those book sales translated to ticket sales: It Ends with Us made $351 million worldwide on a modest $25 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo.
“It made the possibilities feel bigger, but the interest in being more involved was already there,” Hoover says of the film. “For me, the appeal isn’t having ‘producer’ next to my name. It’s getting to participate in the decisions that shape how a story reaches an audience.”
Through Heartbones, Hoover and Levine went on to produce 2025’s Regretting You and cowrote and produced 2026’s Reminders of Him, both of which outgrossed their budgets at the box office.
The release of Verity earlier this month feels like a turning point for Heartbones, with its high-profile director, Michael Showalter, and A-list stars—namely Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett. It’s also the first of Hoover’s thrillers to be adapted.
Hoover’s editor at Grand Central Publishing Karen Kosztolnyik was the one to first get Verity out there after Hoover self published it. “In 2021, BookTok blew her up in such a massive way. I’d seen three of her books on the Times list, and one of them was Verity. I read it, and it was so incredibly different from anything she’d written before.I reached out to her agent. I said, ‘Can we take this over and be her thriller publisher?,’” Kosztolnyik tells PW.
Showalter, who also directed Hathaway in the 2024 adaptation of Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You, was well aware of Hoover because of It Ends With Us, and wanted the chance to tell a different kind of Hoover story.
“Colleen Hoover is in the culture,” Showalter says. “I, as a filmmaker, want to reflect the culture, but I also want to celebrate the culture. This writer is obviously touching a nerve. I’m trying to understand, what is this phenomenon of Colleen Hoover? What is it about her writing that affects so many people so profoundly? This movie is my own exploration of that.”
Showalter says he’s keen to further explore the Hoover phenomenon and work with her again, describing her as “savvy about the filmmaking process.”
Since its release, Verity has made over $122 million worldwide. Meanwhile, the book has sold more than 4.7 million copies since it was published in 2021 by Grand Central.
While Heartbones plans to continue adapting Hoover’s work—a series based on her 2017 novel Without Merit is currently in development—it’s now going beyond the Hoover-verse. In June, Heartbones announced it would produce a film adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s Love, Theoretically with Amazon MGM, which recently adapted Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis.
“Producing Love, Theoretically is an opportunity to help bring another author’s work to the screen, and I’d love for that to be a meaningful part of what we do with Heartbones,” Hoover says. “I don’t need every project to resemble something I would write. Part of the appeal is getting to support a different voice.”
A version of this article appeared in the 10/26/2026 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Colleen Hoover Takes Hollywood
