Hayley Kiyoko’s Feature Film ‘Girls Like Girls’ Took a Decade to Make. Now That It’s Here, She Hopes It’s Just the Beginning for Sapphic Media
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- "Girls Like Girls" opens in U.S. theaters on June 19, expanding Hayley Kiyoko's 2015 music video of the same name, which has amassed 163 million YouTube views since release.
- Maya Da Costa plays Coley and Myra Molloy plays Sonya, with Zach Braff as Coley's father; Kiyoko told Variety she pushed her studio to cast two actors of Asian descent, citing her own Japanese American identity.
- Set in 2006, the story draws on Kiyoko's experience as a queer Japanese American woman, including Coley's mother's death and a line inspired by Kiyoko's own mother losing her mother young.
- Kiyoko changed the film's ending to a quiet shot of the two girls by the pool, dropping the music video's poolside confrontation with Sonya's boyfriend: "I didn't want the last beat to be about him."
- Kiyoko said sapphic love stories rarely get theatrical releases and noted that women of color directors represent just 5% of the industry, framing the film as a test of studio appetite.
- The film is loosely based on Kiyoko's 2023 novel "Girls Like Girls," the first written expansion of the music video's two characters.
Why it matters: Sapphic films with nationwide theatrical releases remain rare, and Kiyoko's June 19 opening lands as a concrete test of whether studios will greenlight more queer women's stories, given her cited 5% industry share for women of color directors. Her decision to delete the male antagonist from the final image is a deliberate creative choice to end the film on the women's relationship alone.
