The hockey romance adaptation of Lynn Painter's bestseller lands its childhood-sweethearts leads, with Josh Boone directing for a summer 2027 release.
Sony Pictures has found its Dani and Alec. Amélie Hoeferle and Graham Campbell will star in Fake Skating, the studio's adaptation of Lynn Painter's young adult novel, Deadline reported Wednesday, with Josh Boone directing.
Hoeferle, currently seen in Prime Video's Sterling Point, plays Dani. Campbell, who was in FX's The Shards and just came off Late Fame at Venice, plays Alec. Deadline said Boone spent much of the summer testing actors for the two roles before landing on this pair.
The book itself has had a big run. Released in September 2025, it won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Young Adult Fiction, has close to 500,000 copies in print, and spent 48 weeks on the New York Times YA hardcover bestseller list, 15 of them at No. 1. It's been translated into 16 languages. That's the kind of number a studio greenlights fast for.
The plot itself is fairly familiar YA territory but sold well for a reason. Dani and Alec were inseparable as kids until she moved away and he stopped writing back. She returns to Minnesota for senior year, expecting the nerdy boy she remembers, and instead finds a hockey star who has half the school's female population in his orbit. They end up faking a relationship, and the rest writes itself, family secrets and buried feelings included.
Deadline first reported Sony's attachment to the project back in March, and the studio moved quickly once Boone signed on. Morgan Lehmann and Victoria Bata wrote the first draft of the script, with Boone and his regular writing partner Knate Lee handling revisions since. Gluck and Jacqueline Monetta are producing through Olive Bridge, Madison Jones is executive producing, and Painter herself has an executive producer credit.
Fake Skating isn't the only Painter book Hollywood is chasing right now. Netflix is separately adapting Better Than the Movies, with Julia Hart directing and Deacon Phillippe recently added alongside Beatrice Kitsos and David Iacono. Two Painter properties moving through production at the same time says something about how quickly her books have become studio catnip.
Just Jared put the release date at July 16, 2027, while Deadline kept it broader at summer 2027, so expect a firmer date once Sony locks its slate. Either way, casting is done, the script is in revisions, and the next marker to watch is when cameras actually roll. That, going by how fast this whole thing has moved since March, might not take long.
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