Lily Bloom's "Best of Boston" award

Here is the 2023 Boston Magazine cover that only exists in Colleen Hoover’s film universe.

Decency

The film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s BookTok hit It ends with us has just hit theaters – starring Blake Lively, featuring a Taylor Swift song, and supporting role by Jenny Slate – and the film is a guaranteed hit, grossing $100 million worldwide in its first week. Like the mega-original, the story is set largely in Boston. Perhaps you saw the film and noticed a certain city magazine (wink, wink) pop up on the screen? Perhaps not, have no idea what we’re talking about, and read on anyway? We’ll explain.

Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) and Ryle (Justin Baldoni). / Courtesy

Lively’s protagonist is Lily Blossom Bloom, a fun-loving free spirit and human flower pattern who moves from the fictional town of Plethora, Maine, to Boston in hopes of fulfilling her lifelong dream of opening a flower shop. The Boston that Lily lives in is a fictional town that bears enough spiritual similarities to reality but doesn’t attempt to replicate it in any way. (No criticism.) In Lily Bloom’s Boston, for example, the hottest new restaurant is Root, a shop selling ingredients sourced directly from the farm, Boston Grace Hospital is an imaginary stand-in for Mass General, and wealthy adult male hockey fans regularly go to Bruins’ bars in their onesies to score free drinks. (The fiction here is not drunk adults in onesies, but the happy hour drinks that are prohibited by state law.) And while It ends with us features majestic aerial shots of the Zakim Bridge, the Charles River and the Longfellow Bridge to create a kind of vibrant urbanity. The film was indeed mostly filmed in Jersey.

But in this romantic melodrama, atmospheric realism is enough—it’s about what Boston represents. For Lily, Boston is not just a place where she can get away from the generational trauma of her childhood, but also a tantalizing beacon of a better life. “Everything’s better in Boston,” her wounded high school love, a boy named Atlas, tells her in a flashback, planning his eventual escape to Maine. Of course, Lily goes where everything’s better (Boston), transforming a run-down Back Bay storefront into the eponymous Lily Bloom’s, an earthy, baroque flower shop. So when, 90 minutes into the film, Lily’s best friend and employee Allysa (who has Slate, Massachusetts, all in her hand) bursts into the store with a copy of that magazine’s Best of Boston issue and shouts, “We did it!”, it’s meant to mark a big moment. The big moment: Lily Bloom’s is voted 7th in a reader poll of the city’s “10 Best New Businesses”!

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment

In Hoover’s original novel, the award is explained as an audience choice award from an unnamed local newspaper. Justin Baldoni’s film helpfully reconnects the 50-year-old Best of Boston series with that magazine. (Many episodes of Best of Boston included results from reader polls, but the The “10 Best New Businesses in Boston” franchise is also a work of fiction.) So when a film exploitation company working on the project contacted us here at the magazine in 2023, Boston Design Director Benjamen Purvis designed a special Best of Boston cover for the film. You can see it on screen, but for posterity, here is the Boston Magazine cover that only exists in the It ends with us Film universe:

Cover design by Benjamen Purvis / Photo by Getty Images

They call it a “hero prop”: an object designed for a main character and so carefully adapted to the details of the plot that it can be scrutinized on camera. These items are small things that you might only see for a second, but their attention to the specifics of the world-building is an art form in itself. And we have to give it to the It ends with us Prop artists who designed the interior Boston Pages They can be seen legibly on the screen. When Lily browses through the fictional version of Boston Double page magazine, the attention to detail is damn good.

For example, the accompanying blurb is an amusing imitation:

Lily Blooms

An avant-garde flower shop has taken Boston by storm! Owner Lily Bloom, who named the shop after herself, plans to change the way we think about bouquets. “‘Just make sure it’s bold and daring, Lily.’ That’s what my mother said when I told her what we were going to do here. At Lily Blooms (sic) we try to do just that! We take everything everyone loves about flowers and do the complete opposite!” What other flower shop caters to people who hate flowers? Lily Bloom does it. Dark flowers wrapped in things like leather or silver chains. Lily Bloom is a game changer.

Even better are the other shops on this fictional list, a brilliant parody of today’s urban, upscale entrepreneurship. There’s A Bone for Bella, “a luxury dog shop and bakery in Somerville.” And Cow Jump Creamery, a “downtown ice cream shop…with waffle cones as big as your head.” Harbor Tea House, an afternoon tea spot inspired by the owner’s “recent trip to London”—how can Boston not already have one? And our favorite: Hardcover Lovers, a Beacon Hill bookstore that has elevated the tradition of shelf-staff recommendations to a first-class “concierge reader service.” LOL.