Five Feet Apart · reception & legacy

2019 · Justin Baldoni

How Five Feet Apart has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Dismissed by critics in 2019 as a formulaic sick-teen weepie riding The Fault in Our Stars' coattails, it's since been partially rehabilitated as the film where everyone realized Haley Lu Richardson was a star — and retroactively recoloured by Justin Baldoni's 2024–25 legal drama with Blake Lively.

What's debated

The perennial fight: is it exploitative 'sick-lit' that romanticizes cystic fibrosis, or a rare mainstream film that took CF seriously — with a side debate over whether Richardson's performance is simply too good for the movie around it.

Its footprint

A year after release, a movie literally about staying six feet apart from the person you love became an accidental COVID-era meme, endlessly joked about as the most 2020-prescient film of 2019.

Where it stands

It lives on Letterboxd as a guilty-pleasure cry-movie of the post-Fault in Our Stars teen-weepie cycle — half-star reviews and 'I sobbed anyway' confessions in equal measure.

★ Did you know? The film flips the usual adaptation order: Rachael Lippincott's novelization was written from the screenplay and hit #1 on the New York Times YA bestseller list before the movie even opened — and the film is dedicated to CF activist Claire Wineland, who consulted on it and died months before release.