Rebecca Serle’s bestselling novel, One Italian Summer, is officially getting a movie adaptation, with Brie Larson set to play the lead role!
Paramount Pictures announced that the film adaptation, directed by Harry Bradbeer, will have a theatrical release on May 12, 2028. Brie Larson stars as Katy Silver and executive produces alongside author Rebecca Serle and David Stone of TFC Productions. Temple Hill Entertainment is producing the film.
Larson confirmed the news on Instagram with a caption that is, honestly, the only caption that makes sense for this particular announcement: “See you in Positano.”
Who Is Rebecca Serle?
Rebecca Serle grew up in Maui and Los Angeles before earning her undergraduate degree from USC and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from The New School in New York City. She is a New York Times bestselling author whose novels have built one of the most devoted readerships in contemporary women’s fiction.
Her catalog spans young adult fiction—including When You Were Mine, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that later became the Hulu film Rosaline starring Kaitlyn Dever—and her Famous in Love YA series, which she co-developed into a television adaptation for Freeform starring Bella Thorne.
Her adult novels include The Dinner List, In Five Years, One Italian Summer, Expiration Dates, and most recently Once and Again, published in 2026.
Hollywood has taken notice of her entire catalog. New Line acquired the rights to In Five Years in 2022. Expiration Dates is set up at Amazon MGM Studios, with Emma Roberts attached to star. And now One Italian Summer has a director, a star, and a release date. Rebecca Serle is having a remarkable run.
What’s The Story of One Italian Summer?
One Italian Summer was published in March 2022 by Atria Books. It was named one of Goodreads Members’ Most Anticipated Books of 2022, and its readership has only grown in the years since.
The story begins with loss. Katy’s mother Carol—her best friend, her anchor—has died. The trip they planned together for years, a mother-daughter journey to Positano on the Amalfi Coast, now looms. Katy decides to go anyway, alone, stepping off the plane into the place her mother always described as the most beautiful she had ever seen.
And then Carol appears. Healthy, sun-tanned, and thirty years old.
The official description captures what follows:
When Katy’s mother dies, she is left reeling. Her mother had been her best friend, her anchor. To make matters worse, their planned mother-daughter trip of a lifetime looms: to Positano, the magical town where Carol spent the summer right before she met Katy’s father. Katy has been waiting years for Carol to take her, and now she is faced with embarking on the adventure alone. But as soon as she steps foot on the Amalfi Coast, Katy begins to feel her mother’s spirit. And then Carol appears—in the flesh, healthy, sun-tanned, and 30 years old.
Over the course of one Italian summer, Katy gets to know Carol not as her mother but as the young woman she was before—before marriage, before children, before the lifetime of love and sacrifice that shaped everything Katy has ever known.
Katy must reconcile the mother who knew everything with the young woman who does not yet have a clue.
The Creative Team
The choice of Harry Bradbeer to direct is the detail that makes this adaptation feel genuinely promising rather than merely pretty.
Bradbeer’s directorial credits include both Enola Holmes films, and—more significantly for what One Italian Summer requires—his television work includes Fleabag and Killing Eve. He understands how to direct female interiority. He understands the specific tonal register of stories about women’s inner lives that are simultaneously funny, warm, and devastating. That is exactly what Serle’s novel needs.
Bradbeer is currently in post-production on Netflix’s A Matter of Time, starring Ben Stiller and Nicholas Galitzine, and is also attached to helm an adaptation of the thriller novel Eight Perfect Murders. He is clearly in very high demand, and the fact that One Italian Summer made his slate is a meaningful signal of how seriously Paramount is treating this project.
Temple Hill Entertainment produces the film—whose previous productions include the Twilight franchise and The Maze Runner—with Larson and Serle executive producing alongside David Stone of TFC Productions.
The only other title currently scheduled for Mother’s Day weekend 2028 is Warner Bros. and New Line’s Final Destination 7. A film about grief, mothers, daughters, and one magical Italian summer going up against the latest entry in a horror franchise on the most emotionally loaded weekend of the year. That is a scheduling decision made with considerable confidence.
Katy’s Going to Positano, Go Meet Her There!
One Italian Summer is the kind of novel that does something very specific to you if you have lost someone, or if you have ever looked at a parent and wondered who they were before you existed. It takes a premise that could easily become sentimental and treats it with the precision of a writer who knows exactly where the emotion lives.
Brie Larson—an Oscar winner for Room, Emmy-nominated for Lessons in Chemistry—has a particular gift for playing grief with her whole body, quietly and without performance. Watching her carry Katy’s loss through the streets of Positano, and then sit across from her own mother at thirty years old, is going to be something genuinely moving.
May 12, 2028 is the date, the Amalfi Coast is the destination, and the novel that makes the whole thing matter is waiting on shelves right now.
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