SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the entirety of Prime Video‘s The Love Hypothesis movie.

Editor’s Note: Trigger Warning – The following contains mention of sexual harassment. Help is available at the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673.

A cathartic scene towards the end of The Love Hypothesis, adapted from the best-selling book by Ali Hazelwood and now streaming on Prime Video, reaffirms the already solid bond between Olive Smith (Lili Reinhart) and her best friend Anh (Rachel Marsh), the foundational relationship at the heart of the love story.

After all, it’s for Anh that Olive starts the “harebrained,” to quote Hazelwood, scheme of fake dating one of Stanford University’s most notorious professors, Adam Carlsen, also known as Dr. Evil for his exacting manner with graduate students. Unfortunately, Adam’s supposedly “close” friend and colleague, Harvard’s Dr. Tom Benton (Arty Froushan) gets between Olive and Adam momentarily when he sexually harasses Olive, but he can’t come between her and Anh.

“It really speaks to their friendship and how they view one another that Olive goes to her to her best friend. Of course she goes to her best friend. She’s assaulted and looking for comfort and to finally admit the truth – something that’s been weighing on her – that she does feel guilty about for lying to her friend, even though it is for her friend’s benefit,” Lili Reinhart told Deadline.

Tom weasles his way between Adam and Olive professionally as well when he offers Olive a spot on his lab bench for her pancreatic cancer research the following year, but he injects the offer with the threat that she would need to sleep with him to earn the spot, trapping her in a hotel room under the guise of bringing her a coffee. In the hotel lobby, he corners Dr. Carlsen as and hints that Adam might hold Olive back all the way in California when she leaves to continue her research in Boston.

“Of course, she’s going to go to her safe space when something like that happens, and she doesn’t have family. Her family is Anh,” Reinhart continued. “So she goes to Anh and finally reveals the truth and tells her what happens with Tom Benton in in the hotel room. It’s a climactic moment between the two, and for the plot, obviously, but also just for Olive having kept all of this inside. I think it finally just has to come out, and it’s cathartic to see her have that release with her best friend.”

Costar Bateman wouldn’t use the word “excited” for the scene in which he embodies a Darth Vader march to go confront Tom about the issue and put the perpetrator in his place.

“When an abuse of power takes place, there’s no such thing as a winner. But in terms of addressing something that’s taken place like that, it felt, I guess, good to be able to do it because these things operate in the shadows. When people behave like this and abuse their power like that, the only way it can continue is if it is allowed to continue, if it’s concealed and hidden from people,” Bateman told Deadline. “So to do what Adam does, which is to kick the door down literally and expose that, it’s incredibly brave. It could risk a lot of things, but it’s the only way that behavior like that is stopped. So I guess it felt good in the moment for the character to be able to do that, but honestly, that sort of section of the film is such a delicate one that. There was no great moment for it.”

The confrontation, captured on social media, makes way for the final step in the equation of a romantic comedy or drama that contains a third act breakup or dissolving of a fake relationship – the admission of feelings between the couple in question. After Olive catches the video, she runs to the building where Adam has just interrupted Tom’s lecture, ready to have a conversation about where they stand.

“It’s a huge scene. It’s where they admit they love each other. That scene was challenging for many different reasons. It was so important for us to make that scene right. So many things had to land to make that scene a success. There was a lot of discussion about the things that they say to each other because it is going off the cuff from the book,” Reinhart said. “The language that they use has to be within their world. They are using science still when they’re talking about love because they’re hiding behind it. It’s funny, they’re trying to be honest with each other, they’re still hiding behind these words that are so flowery and sciencey, and these phrases that they’re throwing out there because they’re being vulnerable with each other, and that’s scary.”

RELATED: 11 Major Differences In ‘The Love Hypothesis’ Movie Vs. Ali Hazelwood’s Novel

In true scientist fashion, Olive first proposes that she received ‘false positive’ results, or made a Type 1 Error, from their fake dating “experiment,” meaning she fell for Adam and assumed he reciprocated her feelings. He then introduces the concept of a false negative or Type Two error, meaning he projected that he didn’t love Olive when he did. They then draw the conclusion that he ultimately “contaminated the experiment,” by pretending there was no affect when there was (his feelings for her), so she proposed they start over with their project.

“I think we got it there. We landed the plane, and I think it’s a beautiful scene. But even just playing with the ‘I love yous.’ That scene was being massaged up until the day we shot it, and even on the day, we were still playing with different versions of it,” Reinhart said. “It was a very talked about and highly discussed scene because we wanted it to be perfect.”

Bateman also pointed out that the classic get together for real moment stood out with specific aspects that make it unique in the broader canon of romantic comedy and drama films.

“Because we have the benefit where we are now in 2026, we have so many romantic comedies that are part of our consciousness. We all know the momentum, where they’re going. It’s hard not to fall into cliché. So that was very important for us to make it feel very real to [Adam and Olive],” he said. “I think the science helped that because it was unique to this story, so it made it feel fresh. I still remember shooting that scene, and it surprised me that it was there.”

“I can still remember [Lili] calling ‘Adam,’ and I turn, and the scene, it surprised me that it was there, which was great. I think it sort of felt very authentic in that way, and I love playing it. It was really fun, and even reading it, I sort of go, ‘Whoa!’” Bateman continued. “In the romantic comedies, that sort of chasing them down at the airport moment, there’s a build up to it. Whereas this, it happened because it’s all to do with the Tom Benton stuff, and then she sees the phone [recording] of it. It happens so quickly; it almost sneaks in the back door, and suddenly you go, ‘Oh my God, I’m at that moment in the movie, and I didn’t really see it coming.’”

RELATED: Which Ali Hazelwood Books Are Becoming Movies? ‘The Love Hypothesis,’ ‘Deep End’ & More

EXCLUSIVE: Sara Gilbert is set to play an “important journalist” opposite Skyler Gisondo’s Jimmy Olsen and Jimmy Tatro’s titular ape in The People v. Gorilla Grodd, HBO Max’s upcoming Superman spinoff series, we hear.

In the half-hour comedy series, a superintelligent ape is convicted of murdering his father, the King of Gorilla City. In an eight-part “true” crime docuseries, the Daily Planet’s Jimmy Olsen reopens the case, investigating whether Gorilla Grodd was wrongly convicted in one of Metropolis’ most famous murder trials.

Glibert joins a cast that includes several Superman actors reprising their roles — Beck Bennett as Steve Lombard, Mikaela Hoover as Cat Grant, and Wendell Pierce as Perry White — as well as new cast additions Mary Holland, Eduardo Franco, Arian Moayed, Dan Perrault, Andrew Leeds, and Tim Baltz.

It’s under wraps as far as which notable journalist in the James Gunn and Peter Safran DC-verse Gilbert will portray. It’s certainly not Lois Lane, as that character is currently played by Emmy winner Rachel Brosnahan, and it’s not Cat Grant. Other notable journos in the DC-verse include Lana Lang played by Annette O’Toole in the feature Superman III; Vesper Fairchild, voiced by Rachel Maddow in the CW Batwoman series, and Gotham’s Vicki Vale played by Kim Basinger in the original 1989 Tim Burton Batman movie.

Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault, creators of the 2017 Netflix true-crime satire series American Vandal, serve as showrunners, writers, and EPs, with Yacenda set to direct all eight episodes. DC Studios’ Co-Chairmen & Co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran also serve as EPs. The People v. Gorilla Grodd is from DC Studios in association with Warner Bros. Television.

Gilbert earned two Emmy noms playing Darlene Conner on the hit ABC series Roseanne, a role she reprised on the series revival The Conners. She serves as EP alongside Michael Showalter on the Sony TV/Amazon series The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh. Gilbert recently wrapped production on the Netflix live-action series Scooby-Doo: Origins opposite McKenna Grace, André 3000, and Paul Walter Hauser. Her list of TV credits also includes The Big Bang Theory, The Comeback, Bad Teacher, Will & Grace and more. Feature credits include 80 for Brady, High Fidelity, Riding in Cars With Boys and Poison Ivy which landed Gilbert a supporting actress Independent Spirit Award nomination. She’s repped by Gersh and Entertainment 360.

An Iowa judge has tossed out Donald Trump‘s lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer, concluding that the president and his allies “stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability.”

Trump has sued over Selzer’s pre-election 2024 poll that showed Kamala Harris ahead by three points. As it turned out, Trump won Iowa by more than 13 points. Trump filed suit under a state consumer fraud law, and Rep. Marianne Miller-Meeks (R-IA) later joined his case as another defendant, as did former State Sen. Bradley Zaun.

Iowa District Court Judge Scott Beattie wrote in his opinion, issued on Wednesday, “Election polling is speech protected by the First Amendment, both because it involves a conversation between a pollster and a voter and because the poll itself is speech. Reporting such a poll during a presidential and congressional election year is speech about a matter of public concern, occupying the summit of the pyramid of First Amendment values. The First Amendment has its fullest and most urgent application to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.”

Trump claimed that because of the poll, his campaign devoted more resources to the state. But the judge rejected the notion that the poll was commercial speech.

The judge wrote that the lawsuit “identifies no act any Plaintiff took because of a poll. Roughly seventy-two hours separated the first publication from the close of the election. Within that period, according to reporting the Petition relies upon, President Trump publicly rejected the poll as ‘a fake poll’ conducted by ‘a Trump hater’ who had ‘oversampled, by a lot, Democrats.’ A party who publicly called the poll false did not rely on it, whether or not it was fabricated.”

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team did not immediately return a request for comment.

Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wjp led Selzer’s defense, said in a statement, “We’re pleased that the court recognized what we’ve said all along: This lawsuit was laughable from the beginning and never should have been brought. The First Amendment does not allow anyone in government, least of all the president, to punish people under the banner of ‘fake news.’”

Selzer said in a statement, “Polling is a social science, not clairvoyance, and no responsible pollster can guarantee an election outcome. What we can guarantee is that we will follow the data wherever it leads, even when the results are uncomfortable or unexpected.” She added that she was grateful that the judge’s ruling “recognizes these principles and reaffirms the fundamental freedom to pursue and publish the truth without political interference.”