Blake Lively Reacts to Taylor Swift’s New Album: Is Cancelled! Aimed at Her?

File this under celebrity-friendship-watch: Taylor Swift just dropped her 12th album, 'The Life of a Showgirl,' and Blake Lively immediately hit like on Taylor's Instagram announcement. So much for the rumor mill insisting they were on the outs.

Wait, I thought they were feuding?

That theory has been bouncing around the internet for weeks. The gist: Lively has been dealing with ongoing legal issues tied to her 'It Ends With Us' co-star and director Justin Baldoni, and whispers claimed Swift had quietly distanced herself. Then Swift released a song called 'CANCELLED!' and Lively, 38, liked Taylor's album post on October 3, 2025. Fans spotted the tap and blasted screenshots on X. If this is a feud, it is the most polite one I have ever seen.

The song at the center of it: 'CANCELLED!'

'CANCELLED!' is the 10th track on 'The Life of a Showgirl,' and it reads like Swift, 35, making a point about sticking by people who get raked over the internet coals. The lyrics do some heavy lifting for the speculation crowd, especially lines like:

'Did you girlboss too close to the sun?
Did they catch you having far too much fun?
Come with me, when they see us, they will run
Something wicked this way comes.'

'I like em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal
Like my whiskey sour
And poison thorny flowers.
Welcome to my underworld
Where it gets quite dark
At least you know exactly who your friends are.'

• Lively has been a Gucci face, so the 'cloaked in Gucci' wink is not subtle.
• Swift name-drops a whiskey sour; Lively sells Betty Buzz mixers and the spiked Betty Booze line. The sour connection is right there.
• 'Poison thorny flowers' lines up with Lively's 'It Ends With Us,' which leans into floral imagery (Lily Bloom is the lead, after all).

What Taylor actually said about the track

She has not named names. In an Amazon Music intro, Swift framed 'CANCELLED!' as her perspective after living through very public pile-ons: she moves through the world differently now, thinks people can get smarter by surviving scandal, and does not drop friends just because the crowd decides they do not like them. She makes her own calls based on how people act with her. Translation: loyalty over optics.

Blake's like, the rumor mill, and the very online reaction

Lively liking the album post does not legally dissolve a feud narrative, but it is a pretty loud shrug at the gossip. On X, fans split fast and loud:

On one side, the Reputation-core Swifties are thrilled. They are reading 'CANCELLED!' as a defender song, a sly middle finger to people demanding Swift cut Lively off. There is a lot of 'this is the dark, punchy track I have been waiting for' energy, plus a few victory laps aimed at folks who insisted another song was secretly about nuking the friendship.

On the other side, critics are calling the lyric 'I like my friends cancelled' tone-deaf in 2025. They are pointing to Swift's wealth, her high-profile social circle (MAGA-adjacent and Zionist accusations are being thrown around), and the war in Gaza — which many describe as a genocide — to argue the song glamorizes being 'cancelled' while glossing over real-world harm. The 'cloaked in Gucci' line is also getting pulled as proof of billionaire obliviousness.

A timeline wrinkle that matters

Swift wrote 'The Life of a Showgirl' during the Eras Tour, which wrapped in December 2024. That was a couple of weeks before Lively accused Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment — an allegation he has denied — per E! Online. If the song was done before that blew up, then 'CANCELLED!' is almost certainly not about that specific legal fight, even if it conveniently maps onto the headlines now.

So where does this land?

Between the Instagram like and a track about standing by scandalized friends, the Swift-Lively friendship looks intact. Whether that was by design or just excellent timing, the speculation is doing what speculation does: sell the narrative and, probably, a few extra streams. Swift has not said who the song is about, and she does not need to — her fans will spend the weekend decoding it anyway. That is half the fun with her releases.