In a conventional publicity campaign for a Hollywood film, every aspect is precision-engineered for maximum impact. The teasers begin early. The rumours from early screenings glow with positivity. The cast stay inseparable from both one another and their two core messages: that the film is tremendous and, boy, did we have a nice time making it.

Last summer, as he prepared to open the romantic drama It Ends with Us, Justin Baldoni took a radically different approach. Rather than go for unity, he and his co-stars appeared to have split. Rather than insist they had a nice time, they demurred. And rather than glow with positivity, he hired the same crisis PR expert as Johnny Depp to allegedly dismantle the reputation of his leading actress.

Baldoni is now the subject of an extraordinary legal complaint filed by Blake Lively, that leading lady, against Baldoni, his film studio, his publicist, and the aforementioned crisis PR team, led by Melissa Nathan, a veteran whose preferred approach could best be described as “attack is the best form of defence”.

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In a way, the most remarkable aspect of the whole sorry saga is that Justin Baldoni thought he could take on the might of Hollywood’s most wholesome and powerful cartel and win. In Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’s Hollywood, it always ends with them.

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