A movie based on Harry Styles fanfic is one of the box-office hits of the year

All eyes have been on Tenet and, to a lesser extent, The New Mutants to see if people are willing to go back to the cinema.

Perhaps we should have been focusing on a different movie altogether though – After We Collided. Never heard of it? We don't blame you, as it hasn't exactly been marketed in the traditional way.

It's a sequel to After (which went straight to Netflix in the UK) and the series started life as One Direction fan fiction (centered on Harry Styles) on writers' social platform Wattpad, the same place where The Kissing Booth was born.

Doesn't sound like the recipe for box-office success, and yet After We Collided is set to become one of the hits of the year. Since author Anna Todd published the first chapters of After in 2013, the series has gone on to be a New York Times bestseller and been read more than 1.5 billion times on Wattpad (as of December 2018), as well as being translated into more than 35 languages.

It's been such a hit that it's no surprise that the first book was adapted into a movie in 2018 after an attempt by Paramount in 2014.

 

The plot would be familiar to any fans of young-adult romances as it centres on Tessa Young, an innocent and inexperienced college freshman who begins a torrid romance with enigmatic bad boy Hardin Scott. In the original Wattpad version, Hardin Scott was literally called Harry Styles and his friends were named after the other members of One Direction. Naturally, this had to change when After was published in print and for the movie version.

While After didn't quite reach the box-office heights of, say, Fifty Shades of Grey (which also started life as fan fiction, but of Twilight), the first movie's $70 million box-office haul from a $14 million budget was enough for a sequel. And After We Collided is well set to better that result, even with the restrictions in place at cinemas worldwide.

Three weeks since its first release, the sequel stands at almost $30 million internationally ahead of its US release on October 23. It might not sound like much, but what's especially telling is how it's outperforming 'bigger' releases.

Take the UK, for instance. Despite the first movie not being released in cinemas, the movie's sales agent and financiers Voltage Pictures secured a deal with independent distributor Shear Pictures to release it in cinemas on September 2.

From only 40 sites, the movie pulled in almost £255,000 (including previews), leading to an expansion over the following weekends.

After three weekends, it stands at £1.7 million and outperformed Tenet in terms of per-screen average, with a strong chance of toppling it from the top spot this coming weekend if it reproduces its 35% week-on-week increase.

In 'normal' times, that sustained run would be impressive, but in this current age of audience restrictions, it's an astonishing achievement and came largely from avoiding traditional marketing routes and appealing straight to the online audience of the series.

"No distributor in the UK had identified that there was an audience for this film," Delphine Lievens, a senior box-office analyst at Gower Street, told The Guardian. "[It's] completely unprecedented... To do that based on no marketing – it's a really impressive result."

After We Collided has not just had success in the UK either. It opened top of the box office in the likes of Italy, Spain and Portugal, as well as delivering the second-highest single-day box office in Russian cinemas since they reopened.

It only took one week of its release for a third and fourth movie to be confirmed by the lead stars Josephine Langford (Tessa) and Hero Fiennes Tiffin (Hardin) on Instagram.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. The next movies will be based on the third and fourth books in Todd's book series, After We Fell and After Ever Happy, which bring Tessa and Hardin's love story to an end. (We won't spoil if it's a happy or a sad one, though.)

Todd also wrote a prequel novel called Before that explored Hardin's life before Tessa and events of the After series from his perspective. It's unlikely that this will be brought to the screen, but if the other movies are as much of a hit as the first two movies, you can't rule anything out.

After We Collided is in UK cinemas now and is released in US cinemas and on digital on October 23, while After is available to watch now on Netflix.