[Source: Entertainment Weekly]

Author Jenny Han explains why the Prime Video series isn’t over yet, and why the movie isn’t coming this year.

The Summer I Turned Pretty isn’t over yet.

Hours after the series finale of the popular teen love triangle drama debuted Wednesday, news broke that Amazon has greenlit a feature film to conclude the YA story.

Creator/author Jenny Han and stars Lola Tung, Christopher Briney, Gavin Casalegno, Sean Kaufman, Rain Spencer, Jackie Chung, and Rachel Blanchard all pretended like they had no idea about the series continuing past episode 11 while on the red carpet at the finale event in Paris on Wednesday.

As the cast and fans gathered inside the Théâtre Marigny to screen the series finale, Tung and Briney slipped back outside to the red carpet where a new “The Summer I Turned Pretty The Movie” sign had been put up. Tung and Briney snapped sultry photos in front of the marquee which then greeted the audience as they exited the theater.

But speaking to Entertainment Weekly on Thursday at the Shangri-La Hotel in Paris, Han is now opening up about the planned movie.

According to Han, the movie will chronicle the one “big milestone” left in Belly’s (Tung) journey after getting back together with Conrad (Briney).

“As I was thinking about third season, I really felt that the journey was so much about Belly’s coming of age and in order to fully tell that story, we need to get to her reunion with Conrad,” Han tells Entertainment Weekly. “And then it would’ve been like a quick tacked-on beat at the end to get to any of the stuff in the epilogue in the book. And I just really wanted to give its due. And we had also been through a whole season of Belly and Jeremiah’s [Gavin Casalegno] wedding and I wanted to have space for whatever the next step is.”

The series finale — which is now just a season finale? — revealed which Fisher brother Belly ended up with. Just as she does in Han’s third book in the trilogy, We’ll Always Have Summer, Belly and Conrad finally reunited (Sorry, Team Jeremiah fans!).

However, their romantic reunion played out differently on the show. Conrad surprised Belly in Paris on her birthday, and after initial awkwardness, they hooked up, fought, cried, and almost ended things for good before ultimately declaring their love for each other.

“That day of walking around together and opening up to him again and letting him back in, I think [Belly] had a lot of fears,” Han says. “When he says, ‘You’re stuck with me forever,’ because it’s not something that she can really go back on if they go down this road, she knows it’s for keeps. And I think when you already had a big blow up where she feels a lot of shame and guilt over what happened, you’re fearful of hurting people — and not just the two people involved, but the whole family. She’s been carrying that weight for a long time.”

As for that steamy reunion, Han adds, “I really wanted it to feel, obviously, romantic and passionate, like the big lead up to this reunion between these two people who really loved each other.”

When asked why a movie is a better fit than a fourth season, the creator says, “It feels very complete to me as three seasons. Another season would be just a lot more story to cover and also a lot more conflict [that] I think people don’t really want. [Laughs] They were so eager to get Belly and Conrad together. Do you really want like a season of problems for them? Because that’s the thing with story is that there has to be conflict.”

That’s not to say the movie won’t have any conflict. “I can say that it’s sort of what happens next,” Han continues. “It’s like, ‘What happens when you are dating your ex’s brother? And you have to see them and you have to be in their life still. What does that look like?'”

Han reveals that she and co-showrunner Sarah Kucserka have “written something” for the movie, but they’re “still in the early stages of it.” And unfortunately for fans, she says it’s “too soon” to say when we’ll get to see it.

“We really wanted to give that surprise to the fans and not leave them in suspense, but it’s still early on,” Han says of revealing the news on finale day. “I know that some of them were hoping that it’s already even filmed and that it would come out right away, but I honestly like having a little more time because I think there’s something very special in the way that we’ve seen these characters grow up on screen. Lola was just 18 on season 1. I think the closer we can get them to true adulthood, to me, it feels like the most poignant and beautiful way to tell the story.”

We’ll just have to wait a little bit longer to get there.

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