Everything We Know About Netflix’s ‘Better Than The Movies’ Feature Adaptation So Far
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- Beatrice Kitsos and David Iacono will lead Netflix's 'Better Than The Movies' as Liz Buxbaum and Wes Bennett, per Deadline; Kitsos is known for 'Percy Jackson and the Olympians' and Iacono for 'Jurassic World Rebirth' and 'The Summer I Turned Pretty.'
- Julie Hart is directing the adaptation from a script by Heather Flanders alongside Hart and Jordan Horowitz, with Horowitz producing for Original Headquarters with Shauna Phelan and Melanie Krauss.
- Hart and Horowitz previously collaborated on Netflix's 'Don't Say Good Luck' starring Sunny Sandler, the same team now reuniting for this Painter project.
- No streaming release date has been set because the film has not yet entered production, despite Painter's novel arriving five years ago and development moving 'relatively smoothly and speedily' since finding a director and Netflix as its home.
- Lynn Painter has a second adaptation in the pipeline: 'Fake Skating' is set up at Sony Pictures with Will Gluck's Olive Bridge Entertainment for a theatrical release on July 16, 2027.
- Painter's 'Better Than The Movies' has a sequel, 'Not Like The Movies,' published in 2024, while her adult romance catalog includes 'Trust Fall' (September 2026), 'Happily Never After' and 'Mr. Wrong Number.'
Why it matters: Netflix is doubling down on Painter's YA romantic-comedy voice with a director-producer duo it already worked with on 'Don't Say Good Luck,' locking in leads from Disney+'s 'Percy Jackson' and Amazon's 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' — two streaming rival tentpoles — to anchor a film still without a production start or release date.
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