I first posted about the film adaptation of The Idea of You about 18 months ago when Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine were first photographed making out on set and it was giving horny. As it should!

 

For those of you who are unfamiliar, The Idea of You is based on Robinne Lee’s book by the same name, about a single mother, around 40 years old, who takes her teen daughter to Coachella to see a boy band (August Moon, basically One Direction) and ends up meeting cute with the Harry Styles of the group, called Hayes, aged 20, resulting in lots of sex and love. Like I said, it’s horny. It’s middle-age woman horny. And it is PERFECT for right now – this is the romance of Instagram and TikTok, lol. This is a romance for multiple generations, a fantasy for women who are more mature, with a hunk who the young girls and the gays can thirst over. We all win!

 

The Idea of You, the book, surged in popularity during the first year of COVID, when we were all stuck at home and watching and reading and getting ourselves off, while also, at the same time contemplating our futures. There were Harry Styles fans who caught onto it, for sure, but the book’s appeal also went deeper: as so many of us were reckoning with the shift in our actual daily lives, it was also a time of deep reflection about ourselves, our identity. Specifically for women of a certain age, our sexual identity. Women who were reading it were feeling seen for how they were NOT being seen, either after motherhood or just simply as they aged. And here came this story about a woman reawakening her sexual self, reawakening herself, period, and in the process getting f-cked real good by a pop idol. 

Now we get to see this play out onscreen through Anne Hathaway who also now, at 41, seems to be in her thrive era, both personally and professionally. Imagine though if Olivia Wilde had been cast? Hahahah, I’ll see myself out. 

 

But on that note… 

There’s a line in the trailer that just came out today that really hits that point. For women, period, but if we’re talking in gossip terms, also for Olivia. 

“People hate happy women.”

People hated happy Olivia with Harry Styles in her bed. HATED. And The Idea of You is obviously going there with Annie as Soléne, when her relationship with Hayes is exposed…which of course is a Problem. It was a problem for Olivia – other women were having a problem with it, illuminating once again that one of the most enduring harms of misogyny is that it turns women against each other. So it’ll be interesting what conversations come out of The Idea of You, the movie, especially online, where women are going to battle against one another every day. 

 

We can talk about that later. For now, let’s just live in this moment of lust and swoons. Because this trailer delivers! It’s a good thing it’ll be streaming on Amazon Prime because we all need to do this in private! 

 

Anne Hathaway is an Oscar winner. More than a decade after Hathahate, she’s been declared as one of social media’s favourite c-nts. We know she can do this, so the question was always going to be whether or not Nicholas Galitzine could bring that sensitive floppy-hair popstar energy to life – and it’s all here. I wrote in 2022 that this film would take him to the next level, like what happened with Robert Pattinson and Twilight because, if you recall, it wasn’t the teenbops who made Robert Pattinson what he became, it was grown ass women tattooing his face onto their bodies. The Idea of You is hitting that demo, so we’re about six weeks away from that moment for Nicholas. 

 

Have you seen some of the artwork from the movie though? Very One Direction coded. I am CRYING. 

 

We're Squawking about this! (app link here)