‘Heated Rivalry’ and the Risk of Loving Romance to Death
A once-niche genre is now a vertically integrated IP machine, and saturation is looming
Daniel Parris is a data journalist, pop culture lover and data and analytics consultant who writes Stat Significant, from which this feature is adapted. He wrote about why Avatar films leave such a small cultural footprint and how much AI audiences will accept in movies and music.
Who will you be seeing Wuthering Heights with this weekend?
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day and that film, today I’m writing about the accelerating business of romance.
A few months ago, a new bookstore opened down the street from my house in L.A. Eager to support, I wandered in and began scanning the shelves. After two minutes of unfamiliarity with the store’s titles — many romance or romantasy — I asked the clerk where I might find Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises. To which the store manager responded, “We don’t do that.” She then launched into a well-choreographed — and clearly oft-delivered — explanation of the store’s model. Their inventory, she explained, was driven by influencer recommendations and romance-centric book clubs.
It’s a model that might have sounded quaint a decade ago. Today, it’s just smart retail. Romance novels now account for roughly 20 percent of annual book sales, and the genre’s gravitational pull extends well beyond paperback racks and Kindles.
Now it’s pulling in Hollywood.
Consider Heated Rivalry. What began as a niche hockey romance series — Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels — is a full-blown cultural event. HBO Max is averaging more than 10.6 million U.S. viewers per episode; the show is credited with a surge in NHL ticket sales and propelled Reid’s publisher, HarperCollins, to a record $633 million quarterly revenue. It also turned its two leads into global stars with a combined 6.5 million Instagram followers in mere weeks.
The scale is startling. The speed, more so.
But Heated Rivalry signals something larger. Hollywood is fully clocking what BookTok figured out years ago: Romance isn’t a niche. It’s infrastructure.
And when studios and agencies discover reliable infrastructure, they don’t nurture it. They industrialize it.
Related:
Colleen Hoover — the genre’s most commercially dominant author — has produced two big-screen adaptations in 14 months (It Ends With Us and Regretting You), with two more on deck. A broader wave of projects — My Oxford Year, People We Meet on Vacation and others — are streaming or moving through development pipelines as executives revisit IP once dismissed as “too niche.”
The feedback loop is already spinning: influencers ignite demand, publishers accelerate production, studios option titles at record speed and streamers amplify breakout hits into global phenomena.
The question now isn’t whether romance can dominate publishing and streaming. It’s whether the machine being built around it will preserve what made a genre built on emotions so powerful — or exhaust it in the process (see: superheroes, dragons, cinematic universes).
Today, I break down Hollywood’s newest IP machine, risks — and what happens next:
The cautionary tale of Wuthering Heights’ budget
How BookTok evolved from a hashtag into a demand engine powerful enough to reshape publishing economics
The concentration risk hiding behind Colleen Hoover’s dominance — and why studios love it
Three cultural shifts that turned romance from “niche” to infrastructure
The novel that quietly rewrote the commercial boundaries of sex on the page
Why current plagiarism lawsuits are a warning sign, not a sideshow
And what the superhero fatigue blueprint suggests about romance’s next phase — and the one thing needed to prevent it
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