Netflix’s highly anticipated adaptation of People We Meet on Vacation—the 2021 bestseller from the popular American romance novelist Emily Henry—is finally here. The movie, the first of five adaptations of Henry’s megahit romance novels currently in the works (and the first of three to be distributed by the streaming giant), follows a nonlinear narrative of two friends—Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth)—who built their friendship via annual summer vacations together, until an incident on one of those vacations caused a rift so deep that the duo hasn’t spoken to each other for a couple of years. In the present day, we watch as Poppy and Alex reunite ahead of his younger brother’s wedding and attempt to reconcile, while flashbacks from the past reveal to us why they separated in the first place.
While the crown for “Best Emily Henry book” is oft-debated, People We Meet on Vacation is one of Henry’s more divisive works, so much so that the original American version of the novel even includes a plot point that was removed from some U.K. editions. How does Netflix’s adaptation handle that controversy and the other sticky plot points? By changing three very key things (and some other small ones). Here’s a breakdown of the biggest differences between Henry’s and Netflix’s versions of People We Meet on Vacation.
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A Massive Location Change: Palm Springs to Barcelona
In the movie, in the present-day part of our timeline, Alex’s younger brother, David (Miles Heizer), calls Poppy to invite her to his wedding that weekend in Barcelona after realizing she never sent in her RSVP. (How he only realized this the week of his wedding is beyond me.) Despite Poppy’s reservations about seeing Alex for the first time in two years since their friendship went on a hiatus, she agrees to go. Poppy—who writes professionally about travel for a magazine—even convinces her boss to let her forgo the feature she was supposed to write about a hotel opening in Santorini that weekend in favor of a piece on destination weddings in Barcelona. She bumps into Alex at the airport, and he offers her a ride to her rented apartment, where they find that the heat doesn’t work and the balcony is under construction. Alex throws out his back trying to fix the AC, which is how the movie creates a scenario in which Alex has to stay with Poppy in the sauna-like rental.
The present-day version of the movie’s story unfolds rapidly. The day Poppy arrives is the same day as the groomsmen’s wine tasting (which Alex misses because of his hurt back), while the following day is the rehearsal dinner, and the ceremony is presumably the day after that. This fast pace gives present-day Alex and Poppy only three days or so to hash out their differences and reconcile. But it all feels a little contrived: Not only is that less time for them to get reacquainted than what they are given in the books, but it makes no sense that Poppy and Alex would stay in a place so dilapidated and hot if Poppy’s job is footing the bill.
In the books, however, the wedding is in Palm Springs, California. When Poppy and Alex reengage in conversation after years due to some random texts they send each other, Poppy suggests they go on another trip, and Alex informs Poppy of the wedding, creating the opportunity to combine the trips. The catch is that Poppy’s job does not greenlight a piece about Palm Springs weddings or anything of the sort, meaning Poppy pays for the trip herself, which is why they do everything on a budget, including staying in a half-broken rented apartment. Poppy lets Alex think her magazine is paying, and they spend days together before the wedding to confront what ended their friendship years before.
The whole point of the setting is that the heat in the apartment is literal and metaphorical, representing their bubbling lingering tension, like being stuck in a boiling teakettle that’s about to blow. Not only does the movie not portray that emotional subtext of the setting (the movie version has them only spending one night in separate beds in the steamy rental before they get together the following evening), but it also doesn’t give the couple any believable reason to stay in the same accommodation in the first place.
The Infamous Vasectomy Plotline
Fans will know: The vasectomy plotline of People We Meet on Vacation is already a divisive situation when it comes to the source material. In the book, as in the movie, Poppy has a pregnancy scare while she, Alex, and their respective partners are all vacationing together in Venice. However, in the written version, Alex gets so freaked out about the thought of Poppy possibly dying in the same way that his mother—who died in childbirth with one of Alex’s younger siblings—did that he decides, on his own, to get a vasectomy. The issue? Well, there are many. First, he wasn’t even with Poppy—he was with his longtime off-and-on girlfriend Sarah, whom he didn’t think about for a second before making a pretty major life-changing decision. Not to mention, even if he did it for Poppy (once again: someone he was not dating and had never slept with at that time), it’s not like he asked her if she wanted that, either. (Instead, he says he froze some of his sperm in case the procedure, which can be reversible in some cases but isn’t intended as such, was not reversible.)
Not only was this decision a wake-up call to Alex about his true feelings for Poppy, but the move is also a large part of why he and Sarah finally, officially, permanently called it quits. The catch is that this detail was mystifyingly omitted in the U.K. version of the book. It is similarly omitted in the film adaptation.
Poppy’s Trauma
In the book, Poppy’s parents are pretty eccentric. They are loud, seemingly boundary-less, and crafted a house full of animals and chaos and big personalities and secondhand clutter because they’re practically hoarders who never buy anything new. Their nature has made them a little off-putting to other residents of the small town of Linfield, Ohio. Poppy is bullied harshly from the end of middle school throughout high school, not only because of her family, but also because she is quirky and the subject of a rumor accusing her of performing oral sex on a kid named Jason Stanley in the janitor’s closet—in reality, gossip made up by Jason when Poppy rejects him after a kiss—earning her the derisive nickname “Porny Poppy.” Book Poppy spends most of her childhood feeling lonely and misunderstood by both her zany parents and her peers. This explains her deep hatred of Linfield and her vehement determination to never move back, which fuels a core part of the big debates she and Alex have about their futures and settling down. This is ultimately a large part of why they never got together previously, even though they both harbor feelings for each other.
In a later scene in the novel, Poppy actually runs into Jason Stanley. He apologizes, and she realizes that he has grown and matured and has a family of his own now. Witnessing this evolution sparks her revelation that she can move on from the maltreatment she suffered and that she doesn’t need to let it define her. This is why Poppy’s grand gesture toward the end of the novel—in which she returns to her high school to confess her love to Alex, a teacher there—is so important. It’s her way of showing him that she would do anything for him, including going to the one place on Earth that she vowed never to return to.
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Everything That Annoyed Me About a Megapopular Novel Gets Even Worse in Netflix’s Adaptation
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Netflix’s New Movie Adapts a Huge Bestseller. There Are Some Key Changes.
This is still present in the movie, but dampened significantly. Poppy’s mother and father, played by Molly Shannon and Alan Ruck, aren’t such a mess; they’re merely eccentric, perhaps too-open, parents. There’s no real focus on Poppy coming from a somewhat suffocating and alienating house of chaos, one where even her younger two brothers (who exist in the book but not in the film) have each other to lean on, while she feels like she has no one. Additionally, the movie mentions her being bullied with the nickname Porny Poppy, but only for a moment. It’s not harped on or made to feel like a prominent part of Poppy’s background the way it is in the books. Furthermore, Poppy doesn’t travel to the high school to find Alex and confess; she does it in Linfield, but not at the particular scene of the crimes of her adolescence.
These might not seem like big changes, especially since a form of each is present in the movie, but this diminishment of each element almost entirely nukes the book’s grounded sense of Poppy’s motivations behind her noncommittal approach to life. And that’s, like, her whole thing! That’s not a conflict, but the conflict! Without it, Movie Poppy unfortunately just seems hard to relate to and even a little annoying. Not to mention that Poppy and Alex being able to admit their feelings so freely to each other is because they both go to therapy—a pretty valuable part of the novel that’s not present in the film.
