Based upon the popularity McMillan achieved with Waiting to Exhale, film rights to How Stella Got Her Groove Back were acquired for a seven-figure sum by Twentieth-Century Fox before the novel was released in 1996. In 1997 Angela Bassett, who played the part of Bernadine in Waiting to Exhale, agreed to star as Stella.

The casting pleased McMillan, who cowrote the screenplay. Although Stella retains her "groove," the film differs from the novel in the addition of clearcut conflict. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan takes advantage of the beauty of his two leading co-stars including Taye Diggs as Winston in the 1998 film release to focus more on the sensuality of the lovers than on their inner emotional struggles. The soft-spoken Winston is the Jamaican Adonis who is perfect in nearly every way except for his brutally condescending mother. While in the island paradise the romance, and the sense of the characters...