The fanfiction community is still going strong.
While The Idea of You is not technically fanfiction, it’s been hard for author Robinne Lee to escape from the speculation that the story is based on Harry Styles and One Direction — Hayes Campbell and August Moon stans, please stand up.
“This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles. Nor was it ever intended as a classic, fuzzy romance,” Lee told Vogue in 2020. “It was supposed to be a story about a woman approaching 40 and reclaiming her sexuality and rediscovering herself, just at the point that society traditionally writes women off as desirable and viable and whole.”
However, the author did model the male protagonist — who falls in love with the mother of a superfan — on the British singer. “Prince Harry meets Harry [Styles],” Lee said during the same interview, noting Hayes is her “dream guy.”
While The Idea of You is more of a loose adaptation, despite what the fans think, there are other films that fall into the actual fanfic-to-movie category.
Keep scrolling to see which films (and TV shows) fans have speculated are based on fanfiction:
‘The Mortal Instruments’ Franchise
Cassandra Clare’s Harry Potter fanfiction, The Draco Trilogy, wasn’t a direct inspiration for the book series. In fact, there aren’t any similarities — despite what fans might think.
“The Mortal Instruments was not a Harry Potter fanfiction,” Clare wrote in a message to fans via her Tumblr. “I don’t even know how you’d get a book series about demons and angels and demon-fighters and seraph blades and alternate dimensions and Downworlder politics out of a fanfic based completely in the canon of Harry Potter (circa book four) that contained none of those things. As rumors go, this one is silly and harmless. But it is also false.”
That being said, The Mortal Instruments book series was originally adapted for a 2013 movie starring Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower. The novels also served as an inspiration for the Shadowhunters series, which ran on Freeform from 2016 to 2019 and starred Katherine McNamara and Dominic Sherwood.
The ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Film Series
The original Fifty Shades of Grey novel was published in 2011 by author E.L. James as Twilight fanfiction, under the name Master of the Universe. The two Fifty Shades sequels — Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed — were released shortly thereafter.
As for the films, the first was released in 2015, starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan. The two reprised their roles for the following two movies, which premiered in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’
The 2016 film is part fanfiction, as it is a reimagined version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice novel paired, quite literally, involving zombies. The movie was adapted from the 2009 novel of the same name written by Seth Grahame-Smith.
The ‘After’ Film Series
Anna Todd’s After book series was originally written on Wattpad as Styles fanfiction: fact. When she signed a deal with Simon & Schuster, Todd published the novels changing the name of her male protagonist from Harry Styles to Hardin Scott.
In 2019, the first After movie premiered and Hero Fiennes Tiffin took on the role of Hardin. There were a total of five films in the franchise with the last, After Everything, premiering in 2023.
‘Red, White and Royal Blue’ Book and Movie
Fans have speculated that Red, White and Royal Blue was a Social Network fanfiction before author Casey McQuiston published the novel (which was turned into a movie in 2023, starring Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez.)
McQuiston has never confirmed the theory, but they did say the fanfiction comparison was “a compliment.”
“Fanfiction is pure pleasure reading,” they shared in a August 2023 interview. “It’s not like almost any other kind of reading. It is here to be fun. It is here to pacify, it is here to transform something that you love into something that you could love in a different way. It’s just pure love.”
‘The Idea of You’ Movie
As stated above The Idea of You is argued to be based on fanfiction. However, this is up for interpretation. While the main character, Hayes (played by Galitzine), is a boyband member with a penchant for older women — sound familiar? — the novel’s author has shut down direct comparisons to Styles.
