The romantic comedy written by a neuroscientist who swapped science for books (and who is triumphing on Prime)

BarcelonaFor a couple of years now, Prime Video has decided to focus a good part of its offering on youth content, and the strategy is working out very well for them. Within this plan, one of the highlights of this 2026 was the premiere of the TV movie The Love Hypothesis, which can already be seen on the platform as of this Wednesday. The film is an adaptation of a book of the same title that has caused a sensation within the BookTok community, the TikTok users who share reviews and book recommendations, very often of the romantic or romantic fantasy genre.

The Love Hypothesis was published in 2021 and spent more than 40 weeks on the list of the best-selling books of the New York Times. In Catalan, the book has been published by Fanbooks, an imprint of Grup 62. The story centers on Olive, a PhD student at Stanford University who starts a fake romantic relationship with Professor Adam Carlsen, known on campus as Dr. Evil. The move is a strategy by Olive to convince her best friend that she has resumed her love life and that she has the clear path to date Jeremy, whom she had been hung up on in the past. In the film, the two main characters are played by Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman.

Author with pseudonym

This romantic story with more than one cliché launched the writing career of Ali Hazelwood, the pseudonym behind which hides an Italian neuroscientist who dedicated herself to writing in her free time. In fact, The Love Hypothesis was born as a story initially published on the internet and that functioned as a fanfiction of the Star Wars saga. The text, which she uploaded to the open web Archive of our own, took as main characters Kylo Ren (played in the films by Adam Driver) and Rey (played in the films by Daisy Ridley) and imagined a romantic relationship between the two. In 2020, a literary agent, who still represents her today, contacted her through a direct message on the platform and approached her about writing a contemporary love story. Hazelwood, whose real name is unknown, transformed the fanfiction into The Love Hypothesis.One of the curiosities of the film adaptation is that the male lead, Tom Bateman, is the real-life husband of Daisy Ridley, who played the character of Rey in Star Wars. In promotional interviews, Bateman admitted that when he accepted the project he had not read the book and was unaware that one of the sources of inspiration was his wife's most well-known role.

On her website, Hazelwood explains that she is Italian, that she lived in Japan and Germany, and that she moved to the United States to pursue a doctorate in neuroscience. During her postgraduate studies, she researched brain simulation and cognitive neuroscience. After three years as a professor, she left science for good to dedicate herself to writing full-time. And that is because, after the success of The Love Hypothesis, several more books followed, such as Love on the Brain (also published in Catalan by Fanbooks) and Love, Theoretically. In her beginnings, Hazelwood specialized in romantic stories focused on the world of scientific research and academia—a setting that is close and familiar to her—but she has also set her stories in the world of chess and has ventured into the fantasy genre.

The film starring Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman will not be the only adaptation of an Ali Hazelwood novel for the screen. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter,Mirabel Michelson, the agent who manages the adaptation rights for the author's books, explained that they are prepared to launch a Hazelwood cinematic universe. "We have an overview of Ali's portfolio of film and television projects; we want the projects to complement each other and generate momentum, rather than just launching them for the sake of having them in development. Ultimately, the audiovisual field feeds back into the publishing sector, and publishing success generates opportunities in the world of film and television. Therefore, they really go hand in hand: her books, the adaptations, the audience, and the brand are deeply interconnected," she argued.

Although it is not known if future adaptations would come via Prime Video, it would not be an unlikely scenario. The platform already has an agreement with the Spanish-Argentine author Mercedes Ron, whose novels they are all bringing to the screen.