A $40 Million Hoover Film Beats Cruise’s Costliest Opening

Amazon MGM’s Verity opened to $32.6 million in North America over Oct. 2 through 4, more than four times Tom Cruise’s bow for Digger. The R-rated Colleen Hoover thriller, made for $40 million, took No. 1 from 3,510 theaters even after audiences graded it a C+.

Warner Bros. sent Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s oil-tycoon satire out on 3,321 screens, including Imax, and watched it finish fifth at $8 million. That is the last wide release the studio will log as a standalone company before its merger closes Oct. 6.

A C+ Thriller Still Took the No. 1 Spot

Michael Showalter’s film follows Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer played by Dakota Johnson, who is hired by Josh Hartnett’s Jeremy Crawford to finish a book series after his wife, Hathaway’s Verity Crawford, is left badly hurt in a car crash. Nick Antosca wrote the script from Hoover’s 2018 novel. The running time is 117 minutes.

Thursday previews put $4.5 million in the till, a sum counted inside Friday’s $15.1 million. Saturday did $10.0 million and Sunday $7.5 million, which adds to the domestic opening of $32.6 million. The per-screen average was $9,293. Overseas added $30.0 million from 70 markets, for a worldwide start of $62.6 million.

VERITY’S OPENING CROWD

• Gender split: Women bought 78 percent of tickets and men bought 22 percent.
• Largest age group: Adults 25 to 34 made up 38 percent of the audience.
• Top markets: Dallas, Tampa, Nashville, St. Louis, Harlingen, Oklahoma City, and Pittsburgh led the domestic map.
• Overseas leaders: The film opened No. 1 in the United Kingdom at $4.5 million, with Germany at $3.8 million, Brazil at $3.5 million, and Australia at $3.1 million.

Critics were colder. The film sits at 33 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Analyst David A. Gross of Franchise Re still called it an excellent opening, saying the reception was not keeping people away. Amazon MGM can live with that math. A $40 million production that starts at $62.6 million worldwide, then moves to Prime Video, is the kind of bet the studio has been placing on Hoover’s readers.

Johnson hosted Saturday Night Live the night before the film opened. Boxoffice Pro pegged this as her strongest domestic debut since Fifty Shades Freed, and her second commercial win after 2025’s The Materialists, which did $36.5 million domestic and $105.6 million worldwide.

Tom Cruise Opens to $8 Million on 3,321 Screens

Digger is the role Cruise took against type: Digger Rockwell, a loud oil tycoon in old-age makeup, balding and heavy, bracing for a climate disaster he helped cause. Riz Ahmed plays Dr. Nirav Ganesh. Sandra Hüller also stars. Iñárritu spent nine years on the project and had platformed his earlier wide films, including The Revenant. This one went wide from the first Friday and took the second-largest share of U.S. showtimes.

Thursday previews were $1.2 million. Friday, including those shows, did $3.4 million. Saturday was $2.6 million and Sunday $2.0 million. Imax contributed $2.1 million, or 26.3 percent of the North American total, which did not lift the average above $2,409 a screen. Overseas added $12 million from 74 markets. The worldwide start is $20 million.

Warner Bros. had hoped for $18 million to $20 million even after a week of falling tracking. Gross said a film this size needed a debut near $40 million to justify the price. Rivals think Monday’s final may land closer to $7.5 million. Either figure is Cruise’s weakest opening since 2007’s Lions for Lambs, which did $6.7 million on 2,215 screens. That film cost $35 million, billed him third behind Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, and finished at $63 million worldwide. Digger is a different scale of miss.

DIGGER’S COST STACK

• Greenlight: Warner Bros. approved the film at $125 million.
• Production: An overlong shoot pushed the cost to $160 million to $180 million.
• Marketing: The studio spent about $100 million selling it around the world.
• Break-even: A Warner Bros. spokesperson put the theatrical hurdle at $300 million worldwide.
• Opening: The film started at $20 million worldwide, with a theatrical loss of at least $150 million already in the conversation.

Cruise takes first-dollar gross, so the studio recoups after he is paid. Gross warned that even decent digital, streaming, and TV money would not close the hole.

For a black comedy, the numbers are not bad. But black comedies are small films, and this isn’t a small film. It’s a Tom Cruise movie. The comedy walks a fine line, and when it misses, it misses.

David A. Gross, analyst, Franchise Re

Reviews were harsh enough that the studio ran “decide for yourself” ads and floated the idea that the hostility was an American quirk. Overseas did not rescue it. The louder commercial problem is simpler. Attempts to sell Cruise as a brand ran into a face covered in age makeup, so the people who buy a Cruise ticket to see Cruise stayed home. Audiences graded Digger a C+, the same mark as Lions for Lambs, and the same mark as Verity. The grades match. The budgets do not.

Colleen Hoover’s Adaptations Keep Selling Opening Night

Hollywood did not come to Hoover for prestige. It came because her books already had a crowd, the films could be made for mid-two-figure millions, and women who are often ignored in tentpole marketing still buy tickets. Verity is the fourth Hoover novel on screen and the first of the set that is R-rated. It is also the second-best opening in the group, behind only Sony’s 2024 hit It Ends With Us.

HOOVER FILMS AT THE OPENING

It Ends With Us went on to about $351 million worldwide. Paramount’s Regretting You, which carries a $13.7 million Regretting You debut in the ledger at The Numbers, finished around $90.4 million worldwide. Reminders of Him opened to $18 million. Those two later films drew B grades from opening-night polls. Verity’s C+ is the softest audience mark in the set, and it is the detail that should worry Amazon about week two, even after a No. 1 start.

The critic-audience split is now the house style. It Ends With Us, Regretting You, and Reminders of Him all went out Rotten on Tomatometer and still opened, because the readers showed up once. Verity did the same thing at a higher price of admission. Showalter and Antosca kept the airport-novel hooks and, in several reviews, stopped short of the nastier turn the book is famous for. Opening night did not care.

Five Films Later, Hathaway Says She Will Disappear

Until 2026, Hathaway had not headlined a major studio film in nearly a decade. She then appeared in five in one calendar year: David Lowery’s Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the dinosaur thriller The End of Oak Street, and Verity. Three of those opened at No. 1. The End of Oak Street opened to $21 million on Aug. 14, which is the fourth Hathaway title this year to clear $20 million, though it did not top the chart against Nolan and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Prada 2 opened to $77 million in May and has reached $220.6 million in North America. The Odyssey, with Hathaway as Penelope opposite Matt Damon, has $620.5 million domestic and $1.77 billion worldwide, and Rentrak’s Paul Dergarabedian has it as the highest-grossing R-rated film on record. Rentrak puts her other four 2026 titles, before Verity, at nearly $900 million domestic and more than $2.55 billion worldwide.

When she first saw the year’s release list, Hathaway said she thought she was being punked, then told the studios to keep going as long as audiences did not get sick of her face. On Oct. 2, the day Verity opened, she posted a video saying, “I’m definitely gonna disappear and take some time off.” She is expecting her third child. The pause has an end date. She is due to join Cruise on Days of Thunder 2 in March 2027.

The Studio Hands Over the Keys After Digger

Digger is the last film Warner Bros. will release before Paramount Skydance’s deal, valued at $111 billion, is set to close Oct. 6. The combined company will be named Skydance. David Ellison remains chairman and chief executive. Mattel’s Ynon Kreiz joins as co-chief executive. Paramount film chiefs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein are in line to run both movie units, which are slated to release 30 films a year. Paramount has already told Wall Street it is planning $6 billion in cuts.

Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, who have run Warner’s film group since 2022 after coming over from MGM, will not be on Ellison’s team. Their contracts had been renewed into 2030 after 2025’s run of Sinners, A Minecraft Movie, and Weapons. 2026 has not given the studio a $100 million domestic hit. Digger, The Bride!, and Supergirl are the expensive misses attached to that drought.

THE MERGER CLOCK

1. Oct. 2, 2026: Verity and Digger open wide. News lands that De Luca and Abdy are out when the deal closes.
2. Oct. 3, 2026: CinemaScore posts a C+ for Verity, matching Digger’s grade.
3. Oct. 4, 2026: Sunday estimates put Verity at $32.6 million and Digger at $8 million.
4. Oct. 6, 2026: The Paramount Skydance merger is set to close and the combined company begins trading as Skydance.

Abdy and De Luca built a reputation for letting directors take studio-sized swings. That instinct produced a historic 2025 slate and, in 2026, a $160 million to $180 million satire that opened like a mid-budget drama. Iñárritu’s film was always a gamble as an original R-rated comedy with a movie-star quote. Putting it out on the weekend the current chiefs leave, against a Hoover title Amazon could recoup in other windows, turned the gamble into the studio’s farewell card.

Holdovers Carried More Ticket Sales Than the Cruise Film

The North American weekend totaled $98,996,568, down 22.4 percent from the prior frame and up 18.9 percent from the same weekend in 2025. Verity accounted for about a third of all domestic tickets. Digger, with a larger screen count than several films that finished ahead of it, did not.

SUNDAY ESTIMATES, OCT. 2 THROUGH 4

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot dropped 46 percent in its third weekend and has $124.9 million in North America. Brad Pitt’s Heart of the Beast, from David Meyers, added $11 million, a 45 percent dip, and has $38.4 million domestic and $98.6 million worldwide against an $82 million production cost. A24’s Primetime, with Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen, fell 58 percent from a $19 million start and has $34.1 million domestic on a $15 million budget, with most overseas markets still ahead.

Forgotten Island took $7.2 million for $23.6 million through two weeks. Disney’s Avengers: Endgame Encore added $4.4 million and, with the reissue, pushed the 2019 film to $2.925 billion worldwide, a hair above Avatar at $2.923 billion. Spider-Man: Brand New Day contributed $2.45 million and sits at about $954.5 million domestic. October’s month-to-date chart already has Verity as the month’s top title, with Friday through Sunday still listed as estimates.

New films due Oct. 10 include The Social Reckoning, Other Mommy, and Angel and the Badman. Verity still has Taiwan, the CIS region, Korea on Oct. 22, and Japan on Nov. 6 to open. Digger does not have a second-weekend path that looks like a hold. Hathaway, who just outgrossed Cruise by $24.6 million, is already booked to stand next to him on Days of Thunder 2 in March 2027.