What’s the suburban Chicago story behind ‘It Ends With Us’?

CHICAGO — Open the entrance door of Wayfarer Theaters, just west of torn-up, under-renovation Second Street in downtown Highland Park. What do you see?

A poster for “Deadpool & Wolverine”? No. It’s safe to say you will never see a poster for that movie at this theater.

A poster for the new big hit of the moment, “It Ends With Us”? Or maybe five movie posters, one for each theater located up the escalator?

Logical guesses, but no. What you see is a hologram, a really spiffy one, underscored by music befitting something important and aspirational.

One by one, friendly humans appear on the hologram and video-welcome you. They are the key people behind behind Wayfarer Studios, the Beverly Hills, California-based movie production company behind that big new hit, “It Ends With Us.”

One is the film’s director and co-star, Justin Baldoni, who is also a Wayfarer co-founder. The other co-founder, Steve Sarowitz, shimmers into view a few seconds later. He’s from Highland Park, and you’re standing in the theater he now leases, and put $2 million into, before reopening the multiplex formerly leased by Landmark Theatres.

“We want to be a home for joyous moments,” the hologram Baldoni says. A little while later, as scenes from Wayfarer-produced films fill the sleek rectangle, the hologram version of Sarowitz puts it this way, with low-key assurance:

“We want to be your refuge from negativity and division.”

As it happened, the formidable $50 million opening weekend of “It Ends With Us” was hounded by both negativity and division. Baldoni, who optioned through Wayfarer Studios the Colleen Hoover bestseller in 2019, also served as a producer on the film. Blake Lively is the star of the movie, and also served as a producer on the adaptation of the tale of Boston florist Lily Bloom, her abusive neurosurgeon husband Ryle Kincaid (played by Baldoni) and Lily’s troubled, devoted first love Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar). Chicago’s own Amy Morton portrays Lily’s mother, who is, like Lily, a survivor of spousal abuse.

Lively took a strong interest in various marketing, musical and artistic components of this project. In the busy run-up to the premiere last week, she told E! News that her husband, “Deadpool & Wolverine” star Ryan Reynolds, rewrote the film’s crucial meet-cute-but-scary-but-sexy rooftop dialogue introducing Lily to Ryle. The credited screenwriter, Christy Hall, shrugged it off in a separate interview, characterizing Reynolds’ contributions as a line or two.

As various rumors and cautiously worded public comments during premiere week suggested, “It Ends With Us” may have sparked some friction, and division, between Baldoni and Lively on set. Did Lively feel unsupported or, worse, unsafe in the environment (“toxic” is one word floating around) fostered by the director? Baldoni told Today.com that the shoot was difficult, as was the subject matter, and that with Lively and others, “there were just moments when I would get out of the way too much.” Others, according to unnamed sources, argue that he didn’t get out of the way, or welcome Lively’s input, enough.

By the time the red carpet rolled out for the New York premiere, the optics weren’t great. Baldoni and Lively did not appear together, at all, and that launched a thousand ships of online snark and theorizing. By Aug. 13, the Hollywood Reporter reported that Baldoni had retained the services of PR crisis manager Melissa Nathan, who previously represented Johnny Depp in the Amber Heard trial. By Aug. 14, “It Ends With Us” was fast approaching $100 million at the box office globally, by only its seventh day of release.

So. A lot happens in a week.

I interviewed Baldoni and Sarowitz prior to the film’s release and their quotes below are from that Aug. 5 interview.

I also spoke to Sarowitz a week later, after things had heated up both financially and gossipwise, and asked Lively for comment, although no answer has yet been received.

Sarowitz is a well-known Illinois billionaire, as billionaires tend to be. He’s also an ardent, idealistic, fully committed philanthropist whose foundation is giving away most of the fortune amassed from his self-started payroll and human resources software company, Paylocity.

“It makes me happy,” he told me earlier this week. Wayfarer’s latest and biggest movie was out, and a hit, and that “allows us to have more projects coming our way.” Money, he says, “is there to be put in the service of humanity.” Elon Musk could learn a thing or two from this man.

The production budget of “It Ends With Us” is routinely cited at $25 million, though Sarowitz says, “I think it’s higher than that. I know it’s higher than that.” Even if it’s closer to the $40-$50 million range, director Baldoni’s feature is eyeing a fine financial outcome for both Wayfarer Studios and its equal partner on this project, distributor Sony Pictures.

In the Highland Park Wayfarer Theaters lobby hologram, Baldoni, Sarowitz, Wayfarer Studios CEO Jamey Heath and president Tera Hanks welcome moviegoers inside with a most unconventional pitch: “We are all love. We are all light. We are peace. We are one. We are joy. We are Wayfarer.” The language and imagery comes from the Bahá’í faith, as does the name Wayfarer, named after the wayfarer in the Bahá’í text “The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys.”

Here’s how Sarowitz met Baldoni. Sarowitz had been a Bahá’í exactly three days when he emailed a friend and fellow Bahá’í about his plans for the future: to retire and teach the Bahá’í faith.

As Sarowitz recalls it, his friend responded: “Yes, you could do that, and reach hundreds of people. Or you could make a movie and reach millions of people.” Sarowitz reconsidered, and for the next five years, he financed, researched, co-wrote and produced what became a one-hour documentary with dramatic re-creations titled “The Gate: Dawn of the Bahá’í Faith.” It streams for free on YouTube.

Near the end of production, Sarowitz contacted Baldoni, best known for several seasons on the hit TV show “Jane the Virgin” and for several directorial projects. A member of the Bahá’í faith, Baldoni offered some feedback and advice on “The Gate,” and Sarowitz told him if he ever needed advice on business matters, he’d be happy to help.

Baldoni contacted Sarowitz soon enough. “He said he was looking for some advice on how to raise a million dollars for this little company he had called Wayfarer Entertainment,” Sarowitz recalls. He responded by offering his services and financing to become a majority stakeholder and co-founder with Baldoni in a new, larger iteration of Wayfarer.

In 2022, Sarowitz doubled down with $125 million in private investment, supporting Baldoni’s idealistic vision for projects built around inspirational human stories promoting empathy, kindness, tolerance, triumph over adversity and, broadly speaking, an appeal to our better angels.

When Sarowitz took over the Highland Park lease, he says, the landlord assumed he’d redo the theater as an event space. Anything but another movie theater. Landmark couldn’t hack it there. But Sarowitz wanted a movie theater run under the Wayfarer name and ethos. “We’re showing the films I want to show,” he says, “and it’s helping me learn the business better.”

Earlier this year, attending the annual Las Vegas CinemaCon convention for movie theater exhibitors, Sarowitz saw trailer footage and scenes from a slew of upcoming releases, “80% of which I wouldn’t show in my theater,” he says. “Speak No Evil,” for example. Horror in general is not Sarowitz’s bag.

And though he doesn’t cite it by name, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is a prime example of the sort of R-rated franchise attraction you will not find at his theater in Highland Park.

“Our films have to bring light into the world,” he says. “Hollywood, to me, there’s just a lot of darkness that doesn’t add to the universal spirit of humanity.”

Baldoni, in last week’s prepremiere conversation, picked it up from there. “We’re not prudes,” he says. “But we won’t glorify or objectify violence or sex. With ‘It Ends With Us’ we didn’t want to romanticize domestic violence. At all. That was important to us.”

Baldoni is an author as well as a director, producer and actor; his 2021 book “Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity” led to a Wayfarer Studios-produced spinoff, “The Man Enough Podcast.”

In our Aug. 5 interview, Baldoni told me: “I’m advocating for men to become safe places for themselves, so that this world can become a safe place for everybody.”

The scenes of physical and sexual assault in “It Ends With Us,” careful to retain a PG-13 rating, could not have been easy to prepare, rehearse and film, especially for Lively but also for Baldoni, They worked with an intimacy coordinator (the standard practice now) along with a stunt coordinator. Baldoni has acknowledged in some interviews that these scenes took him to dark places he found tough to shake.

In our interview Baldoni called his character’s behavior “inexcusable and unforgivable.” Playing him, he says, “the goal was not sympathy. The goal wasn’t even understanding. The goal was to paint a picture of the complexity of how hard it is for women to leave because they love them.”

If abusive men can learn accountability for their behavior, along with self-reflection, Baldoni told me, “that can take the impetus off the woman, so we can stop asking the question ‘Why did she stay?’ and start asking the question ‘Why did he harm her?’”

Baldoni also discussed what he saw as the toxic downside of social media and, in his phrase, “the attention game.” In hindsight, it’s as if the filmmaker knew he was in for a rough ride, promotionally speaking, the closer “It Ends With Us” got to the public premieres and the mass scrutiny of who was being photographed with whom.

“We are all connected via social media and our phones in ways we’ve never been before,” Baldoni told me. “Everyone’s paying the attention game, and we’re experiencing collective suffering and trauma instantaneously, every minute of every day. We’re emotionally drained and exhausted; our adrenals are all shot. And we need optimism. We need hope. We need movies that can remind us that just because we go through something hard, it doesn’t mean it’s the end.”

The reviews for “It Ends With Us” were mixed, but the movie never needed great reviews. “I made it for women and especially for the Lily Blooms of the world who are going through what she experiences,” Baldoni said. “I and the rest of the team did everything we could to inject as much truth as possible while also honoring the source material.”

Wayfarer Studios has lots more in store, including Claire Ayoub’s body-positive debut feature “Empire Waist” opening Sept. 27. Co-star Rainn Wilson is scheduled to appear at the Highland Park Wayfarer Theaters premiere. Then, among other projects, Wayfarer takes on its largest chunk of IP (intellectual property) to date: “Pac-Man.”

In our follow-up interview, after the eventful, gossip-slathered opening weekend of “It Ends With Us,” Sarowitz said simply that “we’re thrilled with the box office.” A hit, he said, should help Wayfarer Studios attract the right people who can figure out how to extract a full-length movie out of a video game invented in 1980 with the express intention, wildly successful in its day, of being as nonviolent as possible.

Sarowitz declined to comment Monday on the rumors of a Baldoni/Lively feud. What’s next, I asked him? Now that the movie is out?

“Rest,” he said. “Justin’s getting some rest, and I’m getting some, too. And it’s wonderful the movie’s doing so well.”

A week earlier, Sarowitz had this to say of his friend, business partner and fellow Bahá’í: “I invested in Justin years ago because I love him dearly, personally as well as professionally. I wanted to see Justin’s voice amplified. And this movie has done that..”

He smiles. “You know, I think most people in Chicago didn’t realize I’m a moviemaker. But now, with ‘It Ends With Us,’ I think more people will.”