For romance genre fans, the past year has probably felt like being a kid in a candy shop, except you don’t have a say in what ends up in your basket at checkout. 

At the tail end of 2025, we had the cultural phenomenon that was the hockey romance series Heated Rivalry; then 2026 started off strong with a classic romcom-in-the-making, People We Meet on Vacation; in the past month alone, we have had Off Campus, which is already shooting its second season, and Every Year After, which also looks set to return. You Deserve Each Other with Penn Badgley and Meghan Fahy has just finished shooting, as has The Love Hypothesis, starring Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman. Beach Read has also just announced its leads. 

This list barely scratches the surface of the romance series and movies released in the past year and those still to come. Interestingly enough, they all came from the same ecosystem: BookTok and the online reader communities that built it. 

This BookTok-to-screen adaptation boom says as much about the romance genre’s rediscovered prestige as it does about Hollywood’s evolving relationship with audiences. 

Recently, it’s become glaringly apparent that studios would rather regurgitate stories based on established intellectual property (IP) than gamble on original scripts to save the bottom line; and now, BookTok has proven to be a lucrative goldmine of beloved IPs. In 2023, Amazon Prime released Red, White & Royal Blue, an adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s BookTok sensation chronicling the romance between the Prince of England and the First Son of the United States. The film proved to be a massive hit and has now wrapped production for its sequel. 

Book-to-screen adaptations are by no means a new concept. Twilight and The Hunger Games were built off the backs of devoted readers and fans. What BookTok brings to the table that previous fandoms couldn’t is access to social media data; studios can now look to online engagement, fan edits, online reader communities, and untapped niches. 

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood was originally a Kylo Ren fanfiction. The book went viral on BookTok, propelling Hazelwood’s popularity and establishing STEM romance as a subgenre. Red, White & Royal Blue and Heated Rivalry have demonstrated that queer romances are not a niche interest, proving to Hollywood that there is a substantial appetite for them and significant commercial potential in bringing them to the screen.

BookTok has not suddenly replaced market research, but has become an important part of it. It’s transformed readers from consumers to tastemakers and marketers. 

This newfound source of IP also gave Hollywood a new take on franchise logic. Studios are now banking on an established author’s entire catalog. Colleen Hoover and Emily Henry, both of whom have multiple books going platinum on BookTok, have more than one adaptation already released or in development. 

Studios are also taking advantage of the interconnected series format beloved by the BookTok community. Much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this model provides studios with a steady stream of built-in IP without requiring them to bet everything on a single story. Off Campus and Heated Rivalry, two hockey romance shows that have taken pop culture by storm, are based on an interconnected series. The first season of Off Campus focused on a star hockey player, Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli), and music student Hannah Wells (Ella Bright); the second season is about their friends: fellow teammate Dean Di Laurentis (Stephen Kalyn) and Allie Hayes (Mika Abdalla). 

If you haven’t had enough of hockey romances, Netflix will be adapting Hannah Grace’s Young Adult novel Icebreaker. And if hockey romances aren’t your thing, worry not. Amazon MGM is developing adaptations of Liz Tomforde’s Windy City series, a multi-sport romance series, and Elsie Silver’s Rose Hill series, a small-town romance series. This only goes to show that BookTok’s influence spans multiple types of love stories.

But influence can only get romance readers so far. Enthusiasm surrounding these adaptations has often been accompanied by frustration because, as much as fans can sway studios’ decisions about what to develop, the bigwigs still have the final say. Casting is usually the first issue that comes up during the development process. 

Most recently, Patrick Schwarzenegger’s casting as Gus Everett, the beloved male lead of Emily Henry’s top novel Beach Read, sparked backlash. Gus Everett has been widely fancast as Logan Lerman or Dev Patel, embodying that brooding yet gentle type who’s quietly charming and a little bit of a mess. Devoted fans argued that Schwarzenegger has the complete opposite vibe: a conventionally attractive, preppy frat boy who’s also a rich nepo baby. 

When a photo from the test shoot was released, it only reinforced fans’ belief that they’d been right all along. Twitter and TikTok were soon flooded with fans dissecting Gus’s styling, arguing that his clothing and hairstyle deviated from the version of the character they had come to know and love through the book. Henry is urging fans to “trust the vision” of the filmmakers. 

It’s an interesting relationship between readers, authors, studios, and IP. After all, even readers of the same novel can close the book and leave with different interpretations of its characters and themes; the same goes for a filmmaker’s treatment. But these disagreements speak to a larger tension between reader expectations and studio priorities, which often have broad commercial appeal at the top. 

As with many fandoms, BookTok readers can feel overlooked. They are, in many ways, the ones who helped transform a book into the desirable IP that it is, yet they have little say in how it’s adapted. Studios increasingly rely on online fan communities to identify trends, generate hype, and ultimately reduce financial risk, while maintaining authority over production and commercialization.

BookTok readers have shown how much power they have, from shaping cultural discourses to driving book sales to providing Hollywood with a new franchise model. Now, whether they will continue as invisible collaborators, become mere consumers, or eventually get a seat at the table remains to be seen.