The Summer I Turned Pretty finale and movie: It’s the only love triangle in town

Forget about Team Edward or Team Jacob. Or the love triangles of Rick-Ilsa-Victor and Duckie-Andie-Blaine.

If there’s a young woman in your life, odds are you know the only showdown in town is between Team Conrad and Team Jeremiah. It’s a cultural phenomenon that has taken over screens, social media feeds and even physical spaces.

The show is The Summer I Turned Pretty, an American teen drama centred on the character of Belly (Lola Tung), a tender-hearted and earnest young woman whose entire personality seemed to be loving at least one of Conrad or Jeremiah at any one time (sometimes both).

But perhaps that’s one of the reasons why the series has become so wildly popular – Belly was something of a blank sheet onto which any viewer could project themselves and their own fantasies.

For three years, the series pursued this question of who will Belly end up with, and each brother got to make a case until the (probably) final choice when the series wrapped up yesterday.

SPOILER ALERT

In theory, it was always going to be Conrad, because that was how it was written in Jenny Han’s books, on which the show was based, and Han was also the showrunner of the series so it seemed unlikely she would undo her own original ending.

There was still a chance Han could’ve swerved and picked Jeremiah. Or, heavens forfend, maybe Belly could have just picked herself, and left the Fisher brothers in the rearview as a young woman in her early 20s about to embark on a years-long journey of self-discovery.

But can you imagine the howls of protest from the legion of viewers who have invested years in The Summer I Turned Pretty’s essential conflict?

At least they would’ve been screaming about it together. It may not be on everyone’s radar in the same way that Game of Thrones or Squid Game was but make no mistake, for a certain demographic, The Summer I Turned Pretty is a very big deal.

Even in the era of individualised convenience in which every episode could be watched on any screen they want – on their phone from bed, on the lounge room TV and everything in between – the series has brought audiences together in the same space.

Watch parties have popped up all over the world. At Sydney’s The Chippo Hotel, it was a weekly event on Wednesdays when a new episode dropped, while there were also finale gatherings at the University of Technology, Sydney, Wollongong University, pubs The Golden Sheaf and Tea Gardens among many.

The fandom is overwhelmingly female and young, and on Amazon Prime Video, the platform on which The Summer I Turned Pretty, the series is the most-watched among women aged 18 to 34.

The streamer has not yet released updated figures but in the first week of the third season, the show had been watched by 25 million viewers, and was number one on its internal charts in more than 120 countries.

More than its first two seasons, which were released in 2022 and 2023, the mania around this latest season reached fever levels thanks to the supercharged presence on social media. Unless your algorithm is specifically geared towards fishing or some other oppositional interest, you can’t have missed it. Virality begets virality begets virality.

The original book series, published 15 years ago, is back on the bestseller charts (it’s number one on The New York Times children and young adult series list).

So, where does that leave Prime Video, which now has a deeply engaged and salivating audience on its hands but the promise that this was always going to be a three-season show?

With a movie, of course.

At the finale red carpet in Paris last night, the production confirmed it wasn’t completely done with Belly and the Fisher boys just yet. A streaming movie has been greenlit with Han teasing that there’s “another big milestone left in Belly’s journey, and I thought only a movie could give it its proper due”.

What could that possibly be … ?