Hollywood ‘It’ couples are often put on a pedestal, but they are seldom able to stay there. Sometimes it feels like the only thing people love more than seeing celebrity couples rise to the top is watching them fall.

The latest victims are former Hollywood favourites, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. The couple first got together in 2011 and married the following September, and they now have four children together – three daughters and a son. Until recently, they were widely considered untouchable. Aside from gushing about each other in interviews, they have managed to keep details of their family life fairly private and have both remained popular and largely inoffensive players on the Hollywood scene.

However, in a summer that sees them both star as leads in two of the biggest box office films – Deadpool & Wolverine and It Ends With Us – the tide has started to turn. While Reynolds has been promoting a Marvel blockbuster alongside Hugh Jackman, Lively has been promoting the screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel, which deals with themes of generational trauma and domestic abuse.

They have both been marked presences on the red carpets of each other’s premieres, and Lively even said that Reynolds ‘wrote the iconic balcony scene’ in It Ends With Us, which was news to the screenwriter Christy Hall who said she had ‘no idea’ Reynolds was involved. The Gossip Girl star said, ‘He works on everything I do; I work on everything he does. His wins, his celebrations are mine and mine are his.’ As such, Lively has been accused by some of using the film to promote their brand as a couple.

Some fans have even accused them of wanting It Ends With Us and Deadpool & Wolverine to be their ‘Barbenheimer’ moment – referencing the box office battle between Barbie and Oppenheimer last summer, where fans were encouraged to dress up in pink and black to see each film. One fan on X wrote, ‘Blake Lively is finished. A movie about domestic violence is not Barbie 2.0’

Lively has also been criticised for appearing to make light of the film’s darker themes during interviews by telling fans to ‘grab your friends, wear your florals’ and to head to the cinema. The actress later clarified that she thinks her character Lily Bloom ‘is not just a survivor, and she’s not just a victim, while those are huge things to be, they’re not her identity’.

This has been in stark contrast to the director, Justin Baldoni, who has repeatedly emphasised the film’s more serious nature. At a screening in LA, he spoke to the audience before the film started and said, ‘This film is about love, it’s about hope, it’s about romance. But it’s also about something very serious – intimate partner violence. […] If you see somebody at the end of this film sitting alone and shaking or emotional, maybe consider going up to them and asking them if you can support them in some way.’

The apparent discrepancies between Lively and Baldoni’s understandings of the film, and indeed their approaches to marketing it, have been widely discussed online with Lively receiving a great deal of backlash. Last week, she appeared to respond to the criticism via her Instagram story, writing: ‘One in four women aged 18 and older in the US alone have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Intimate partner violence affects all genders, including more than 12 million people every year in the United States. Everyone deserves relationships free from domestic violence.’ She also shared a link to the National Domestic Violence helpline as a resource.

Unfortunately for Lively, the backlash surrounding her promotion of It Ends With Us has meant a series of past interview clips have resurfaced online. In one viral clip from the Café Society press junket in 2016, journalist Kjersti Flaa says ‘Congratulations on your little bump’ to a then-pregnant Lively and the actress sarcastically responds, ‘Congratulations on your little bump.’ Flaa has since admitted the interview left her feeling ‘paralysed’ and ‘like a complete failure’. The interaction has become a breakout search term on Google, with ‘Blake Lively rude interview’, ‘Blake Lively awkward interview’ and ‘Blake Lively bad interview’ all related queries.

Lively has also been called out for using the hype around It Ends With Us to promote her haircare line, Blake Brown Beauty, which she launched in tandem with the film. She also sponsored the premieres with her alcohol company, Betty Buzz, and had cocktails named after characters. One such drink is called ‘Ryle you wait’, with Ryle being the name of the man who abused her character in the film. Another is called, ‘It Ends With Buzz’.

One TikToker (@bee.better.company) posted a video about this PR mishap and said, ‘Did nobody on your team think about the fact that alcohol is something that’s present in 90% of domestic violence cases and that this would not go over well?’ The video, which details ‘the downfall of Blake Lively’, has been viewed 6.6 million times and liked by 721k people. Lively has not yet responded to the post.

While it’s hard to imagine this type of pile on happening to a male actor in the same way, it’s easy to understand why fans are disappointed – and why Lively and Reynolds’ status as a Hollywood golden couple has suffered.

There is every chance they will recover (they still have millions of doting fans between them), but this is certainly not their Barbenheimer summer. Instead, it is a careful lesson in PR and a reminder not to underestimate the savvy of your audience.