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On the 2026 movie schedule, it feels like a film can come from anywhere. A YouTube creepypasta can become Backrooms, A24’s highest-grossing movie, or a man with a large forearm tattoo can inspire Maggie Gyllenhaal to make The Bride!. In the case of Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls Like Girls, it’s been a long time coming for the singer ever since her music video of the same name went viral. CinemaBlend talked to the first-time feature writer/director about the “challenging” process of turning her lesbian pop anthem into a grounded coming-of-age movie, and wow, what a journey it's been!
How A Music Video Inspired The Girls Like Girls Movie
On June 24, 2015, Hayley Kiyoko released the “Girls Like Girls” music video, which went viral among the queer community for representing a lesbian love story between Coley and Sonya without sexualizing them. The video is frequently cited as a popular “lesbian awakening” touchstone that has also amassed 163 million views over the past 11 years. Check it out below:
![Hayley Kiyoko - Girls Like Girls [Official Music Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/I0MT8SwNa_U/maxresdefault.jpg)
Kiyoko took a cinematic approach to the video at the time, and fans instantly took notice. When I asked the pop star if she was thinking about making a movie on the set back then, she said this:
I don't think we were thinking anything of it when we were actually shooting the music video. When I released the music video in 2015, there were so many comments that were like, ‘We need this as a movie.’ ‘This should be a feature film.’ And I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, I've never been able to buy tickets to go see a movie like this before.’ And, how cool would that have been to be able to have that representation? And so the fans planted the seed. And I loved directing. I ended up directing eleven music videos after that, and I was like, maybe directing is my path.
Thanks to tons of fans calling out their desire for the concept of Girls Like Girls to become a full-blown movie, it’s a film today. But there’s over a decade between the music video and this project being one of the latest LGBTQ+ movie releases.
Why It Took 10 Years To Become A Movie
Since Girls Like Girls became a hit song and music video, Hayley Kiyoko has been busy earning the title of “Lesbian Jesus” among her fandom as she kept making music, going on tour, and ended up helming a bunch of her own videos after her 2015 debut. But the Girls Like Girls movie never left her to-do list. As she continued in our interview:
It really was right after the music video was released, and then starting in 2016. So it really has been 10 years [of] developing the story, trying to figure out how to tell the story, how to tell my story in these preexisting characters. And then began this journey of how does one get a movie funded? How do you get a producer attached? How do you convince the world that you are the person to tell this story? And it took a very, very long time to find the right team of people to really champion the story at large.
Kiyoko finally found the right partners in Focus Features and big-time Hollywood producer Marc Platt, who has also been behind movies like Legally Blonde, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Drive, La La Land and the Wicked movies. As she added:
There was never a version [where I wasn’t the director]. But I think just as a first-time director, your mission is to try to convince people that you can do this and that you know the story better than anyone else and that you are able to execute. And when it comes to financing a film, it's very, very challenging. And especially being a woman of color, there's only a handful of us in the industry.
Hayley Kiyoko now joins the few game-changing women directors who broke through industry norms to realize a unique vision. There aren’t enough movies with lesbian characters, and the Girls Like Girls film is a rare instance of Hollywood giving them center stage.
Why Hayley Kiyoko Never Lost Hope
A decade is a long time to stick to a vision, but that can very much be a popular story when it comes to impassioned filmmakers trying to make a different sort of movie. When I asked her what’s kept her going as a loud advocate for the LGBTQ+ community across her career, she said this:
[Representation] means a lot to me. It definitely is what drives me. Pivoting and writing the YA novel and getting into the YA space has been out of necessity of, ‘We need our stories told and heard.’ And if they're not gonna make our stories into movies, then I'm gonna at least tell the story to the youth at the libraries. And so, every point in my career and every pivot has always been out of a necessity to reach my community and to fill that space.
Before Girls Like Girls became a movie, Kiyoko turned it into a YA novel, making it one of the new book-to-screen adaptations, as well. The novel became a #1 New York Times Bestseller, perhaps assisting the case for a Girls Like Girls movie. Kiyoko also recently released a lesbian period novel called Where There’s Room For Us in November. As she also told us:
Sometimes I'll watch interviews of celebrities answering questions like, ‘What's your favorite movie for Pride Month?’ And, you can see their wheels turning. Specifically for sapphic women, we don't have a lot of representation. And then when we do, it's once every 10 or 20 years, or it's from overseas. And so, to be able to get the story across the finish line to a place where we actually can buy tickets and go see this movie and unapologetically call it Girls Like Girls, that's been my mission this last decade.
A movie idea can certainly come from anywhere, but it needs the right kind of drive to get made, and Kiyoko had it! Girls Like Girls finally hits theaters this Friday, June 19.
