The vibes are officially rancid.

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni have landed in New York, but nobody is rolling out a red carpet. There are no floral-themed press junkets or strategically coordinated outfits. Instead, we’re looking at the grim, fluorescent reality of mandatory mediation. It’s the legal equivalent of a "get-along shirt," except the shirt costs fifteen grand in billable hours and everyone involved looks like they’d rather be undergoing a root canal.

They’re here because a judge told them they have to be. In the eyes of the New York legal system, these aren’t the stars of a surprise box-office juggernaut; they’re two litigants in a high-stakes game of chicken. The goal is to avoid a trial. Because trials are messy. Trials mean discovery. Trials mean every passive-aggressive text message, every disparaging email about a "creative difference," and every leaked Slack thread from the editing bay becomes public record.

For two people whose entire careers depend on curated likability, discovery is the ultimate poison.

The friction here isn’t just about who got the final cut of a movie. It’s about the collision of two massive, incompatible PR stacks. On one side, you have the Lively-Reynolds ecosystem—a multi-platform marketing machine that turns everything it touches into a lifestyle brand. On the other, you have Baldoni’s earnest, director-as-auteur aspirations. When those two gears ground together during the post-production of It Ends With Us, the sparks didn't just fly; they scorched the entire press tour.

Now, they’re trapped in a conference room in Midtown. It’s a required effort to stop the bleeding. If this goes to trial, we aren’t just talking about a breach of contract or a dispute over royalties. We’re talking about the systematic dismantling of a "perfect" public image. The price tag for a full-blown courtroom circus is estimated to climb north of $5 million in legal fees alone, but that’s pocket change compared to the brand damage. Lively can’t afford to be seen as the mean girl; Baldoni can’t afford to be the difficult visionary nobody wants to hire.

The coffee in these rooms is always terrible. It’s meant to be. It keeps everyone irritable enough to want to leave, but focused enough to sign the paperwork. The mediation is a forced march toward a settlement that will likely involve a lot of nondisclosure agreements and a very carefully worded joint statement that says absolutely nothing.

It’s a strange ritual. They’ve spent months avoiding each other on red carpets, using proxies to leak stories to the trades, and letting the internet’s gossip mill do the heavy lifting. But the law doesn't care about your TikTok engagement or your curated Instagram feed. The law wants to know why the contracts weren't followed. The law wants to see the receipts.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with watching celebrities pretend to be victims of their own success. They made a movie about breaking cycles of trauma, yet here they are, locked in a cycle of litigation that feels as predictable as a third-act twist. The irony isn't lost on anyone except, perhaps, the people in the room.

The trade-off is simple: pay a massive settlement now, or let a jury decide which one of you is the villain. In an era where a single "bad vibe" can tank a franchise, that’s not much of a choice. They’ll likely find a middle ground. They’ll shake hands—or have their lawyers do it—and walk away with their secrets intact.

When the dust settles and the lawyers buy their new vacation homes, will anyone actually remember the movie, or just the sound of the gears grinding?