Tom Bateman is back in the new The Love Hypothesis trailer, released by Prime Video on August 26. The footage puts Lili Reinhart’s Olive Smith and Bateman’s Adam Carlsen into a fake dating setup that looks designed to shift how Stanford University sees him before the film’s September 23, 2026 streaming premiere.
Lili Reinhart and Adam Carlsen
The trailer’s clearest business for viewers is the pairing: Reinhart as Olive Smith and Bateman as Dr. Adam Carlsen. A scene in which Olive rubs sunscreen on his back, along with the kiss she uses to prove she is not interested in her crush Jeremy, makes the relationship feel less like a one-scene joke and more like the engine of the adaptation.
That setup tracks with the earlier teaser released on June 27 out of Obsessed Fest, which framed Olive as a brilliant Ph.D. candidate focused on her future in academia. This new trailer pushes the same premise further, showing how a private arrangement can become the story’s main pressure point rather than a side note.
Claire Scanlon on Prime Video
Claire Scanlon directs the film, which is based on Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis and set in the high-stakes world of academia at Stanford University. The new trailer is set to Reneé Rapp’s “Messy,” a choice that keeps the cut moving while the film leans into the awkward, transactional logic of Olive and Adam’s arrangement.
Rachel Marsh appears as Ahn and Nicholas Duvernay as Jeremy, but the trailer keeps the frame tight on Olive’s attempt to control how she is read by the people around her. Bateman’s character is introduced as the professor whose grant may not be renewed because he is seen as a “flight risk,” which gives the fake dating arrangement a practical purpose beyond romance.
Dr. Evil and the grant
Olive calls Adam Carlsen “Dr. Evil” right after kissing him at a water fountain, and the teaser already showed her saying, “I’m seeing someone,” followed by “No, like a human man.” That friction matters because the story is built on performance slipping into feeling; the arrangement starts as cover, then begins to affect how both characters are seen inside the school.
The trailer’s final edge is the easiest one to read: if the school’s research-grant decision turns on whether Carlsen looks settled or temporary, the relationship stops being a cute workaround and becomes leverage. Prime Video is positioning that uncertainty as the hook all the way to September 23, 2026, when The Love Hypothesis premieres exclusively on the service.
