Jenny Han has created not one, not two, but three amazing franchises based off of her own books! From To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, to The Summer I Turned Pretty and XO, Kitty, she is truly a queen of the romance genre. Not only has she adapted her own work, but she also appears in many of her own projects! Keep reading to uncover all of her appearances in the Jenny Han-universe.
The author’s first adaptation of her work was To All the Boys, which dropped on Netflix in 2018 and became an immediate hit, sparking two sequel films. Jenny spoke about how involved she was in the movie-making process during an interview with Vox in 2019.
“On the first movie I consulted on the script and I consulted on costumes, and I gave notes once the cut was done. On the second movie, I was definitely more involved. I was involved during pre-production and I was on set during filming,” she told the outlet.
She added, “The movie has some differences from the book, but I think that what the movie was successful at was what I hoped to do with the book, which was to make people feel really warm and cozy when they watched it. That, to me, is more important, that feeling when you walk away with when you watch a movie, than the literal one-to-one adaptation.”
Since the To All the Boys trilogy wrapped in 2021 with To All the Boys: Always and Forever, Jenny has been quite busy! She wrote and produced a spinoff titled XO, Kitty, starring Anna Cathcart as her To All the Boys character, Kitty Covey, which was released in 2023.
However, Jenny’s biggest hit came in the summer, quite literally. The adaptation of her book series The Summer I Turned Pretty dropped on Prime Video in June 2022, and the world has never been the same. Season 2 of the highly-successful teen romance show dropped in July 2023.
Colin Ferguson, Summer Madison, Minnie Mills, Christopher Briney, David Iacono, Lola Tung, Gavin Casalegno, Sean Kaufman, Jenny Han and Jackie Chung
‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ premiere, New York, USA – 14 Jun 2022 AFF-USA/Shutterstock
Jenny works as a producer, writer and co-showrunner on the show, and spoke about why she went the TV route for TSITP, rather than a film franchise like she did for To All the Boys during an interview with W Magazine in July 2023.
“There’re so many stories that I wish we could have told from the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series, but there just simply wasn’t room within the movie,” she said. “We were able to not only dig into the series for The Summer I Turned Pretty, but also create a new story and really branch out on characters that we don’t get to spend as much time with. Steven is one of my favorite characters, but in the second book, he’s visiting colleges. So you don’t get to see much of Steven or Laurel or anybody who isn’t Belly, Jeremiah and Conrad. That still was a challenge even in the TV show, but it’s a fun one.”
Click through our gallery to see all of Jenny’s cameos in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, The Summer I Turned Pretty and XO, Kitty!
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