Romance Movies
‘Materialists’ Ending Explained: Who Does Lucy End Up With?
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Materialists.]
It’s Celine Song‘s world, and we’re just living in it.
On June 13, 2025, A24 released its newest romance film, Materialists, written and directed by Past Lives creator Celine Song. Starring Dakota Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey), the film follows Lucy, a wildly successful matchmaker at Adore Matchmaking in New York City. At a client’s wedding, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), an incredibly rich businessman, who is handsome and over six feet tall, making him the kind of unattainable bachelor that her industry refers to as “a unicorn.” The same night, Lucy reunites with her ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), an aspiring actor who lives with roommates and needs to pick up catering shifts to make ends meet.
In Lucy’s industry, a successful marriage is a business transaction, and romantic connections can be reduced to a simple equation. Therefore, if you add together two people with the same level of attractiveness, similar finances, aligned political views, and more, the output will be a solid relationship. While there are ways to boost your marketability (for example, Short Kings could invest in leg-lengthening surgery), Lucy makes it clear that you’re pretty much stuck in one box forever. This means that, financially, Lucy is too far out of reach for John, and Harry is too far out of reach for Lucy. However, Harry insists that he and Lucy would make a fantastic match because she wants to marry rich, and he is, well … absolutely loaded.
Throughout the film, we see Lucy caught in a classic love triangle between her unicorn Harry and her thoughtful ex John, a.k.a. the “poor” guy she broke up with years ago because she didn’t want to spend their fifth anniversary “eating from a halal cart.”
Is Materialists a billionaire love story or a second chance romance? Scroll to find out who Lucy picks at the end of Materialists!
Atsushi Nishijima / © A24 / courtesy Everett Collection
Who does Lucy end up with in Materialists?
Lucy ends up with John in Materialists. After setting up a date that goes horribly wrong between her clients, Sophie and Mark, Lucy becomes disillusioned by her matchmaking job. This causes her to realize that even though her relationship with Harry is perfect on paper, the relationship formula that she once championed excludes love from the equation. Meanwhile, John knew Lucy before she had a successful career and values her, even though she isn’t perfect. After she breaks up with Harry, Lucy finds herself outside John’s apartment asking to stay with him. Instead, the two drive upstate and crash a wedding. There, they admit that they are still in love with each other.
In the end, we see John buying two meals from a halal cart for a date with Lucy in the park. There, he makes an engagement ring out of a flower and puts it on her finger, mirroring the cave people at the beginning of the film, who represented the first people to ever get married. Instead of asking her to marry him, he asks: “How’d ya like to make a very poor financial decision?”
Atsushi Nishijima / © A24 / courtesy Everett Collection
What happens to Harry Castillo?
At the end of Materialists, Harry Castillo is an official client of Adore Matchmaking, which tells us that he is still looking for marriage. The night before Lucy and Harry’s trip to Iceland, Lucy realizes that their relationship is artificial and breaks up with him. Before she does, she spots scars on his legs and realizes he isn’t as effortlessly perfect as she once assumed. Turns out, both he and his brother (one of her clients) underwent the infamous leg-lengthening surgery to become the “unicorns” that they are.
Will there be a Materialists sequel?
No, there will not be a Materialists sequel. Or at least, at this time, there is no confirmation of a Materialists sequel coming anytime soon. During the credits scene, we see Lucy and John getting their marriage license at the NYC Marriage Bureau in the City Clerk’s office, perfectly wrapping up the plot.
This ties up all of Lucy’s loose ends, leaving no room for another film. That is, unless they choose to answer whether or not Lucy decided to take a promotion at Adore, or hand in her resignation. However, we’d argue that the change in her perspective on material goods by the end of the film means that we already know her answer.
Materialists, In Theaters, June 13, 2025
