Verity Box Office Debut Eyes $35M in Tom Cruise Showdown

This weekend has a genuine box office fight on its hands. Verity, the Colleen Hoover thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, opens in theaters on October 2 against Tom Cruise's dark satire Digger. Variety's forecast puts the Verity box office debut at a $35 million domestic target, per tracking coverage compiled this week (Archynetys), which would hand Hathaway her third number one movie this year.

The setup is pure psychological thriller. Michael Showalter directed the Amazon MGM release from a Nick Antosca screenplay based on Hoover's bestselling novel. Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired by Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) to finish the best-selling book series of his wife, the famous author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), after she is left incapacitated by a car accident. Once inside the Crawford house, Lowen finds autobiographical notes that change how she sees Verity and blur the line between fiction and reality. The movie runs 117 minutes and carries an R rating, which sets it apart from the earlier Hoover adaptations, all PG-13.

Where the Verity box office numbers land

Verity is the fourth Colleen Hoover novel to reach the screen, and the track record is solid but uneven. It Ends With Us opened to $50 million in 2024, Regretting You to $13.6 million and Reminders of Him to $17.8 million, according to Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast (Boxoffice Pro). Deadline reported this week that the domestic outlook for Verity sits at $30 million-plus at more than thirty-five hundred theaters, with a shot at fifty-five million worldwide once offshore territories are counted (Deadline via Yahoo). The reported production budget is $40 million, so the Verity box office only needs a modest opening to cover its costs.

Studio tracking has since settled in the high twenties, still enough to top Digger, according to ComicBasics. The timing could not be better for Hathaway. She is closing out the biggest year of her career: the Devil Wears Prada sequel earned $693 million, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has grossed $1.72 billion, and she has already appeared in Mother Mary and The End of Oak Street, per box office tracking coverage (ComicBasics). Verity is her fifth film this year, and a strong opening would be the third time this year she has topped the domestic chart. Her hot streak is a big reason tracking stayed high even as forecasts for Digger kept sliding.

Digger is heading for a rough weekend

Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger stars Cruise as an oil tycoon whose company caused a catastrophic climate disaster, with Riz Ahmed, John Goodman and Sandra Huller in support. But the Verity box office momentum is bad news for Warner Bros. The studio forecasts $12 million to $15 million for Digger domestically, while other analysts say the film would be lucky to break $10 million (Deadline via Yahoo). That would rank among the worst wide-release starts of Cruise's career, and it stings on a film with a reported net production cost of $125 million, with some rumors pushing the figure to $140 million or $150 million. Roughly fifteen million to twenty million more is expected from abroad, though the film has no China release.

Digger already had its splashy royal premiere in London, where William and Kate showed up, but premieres do not sell tickets by themselves. Verity has the opposite situation: reviews are split. ComingSoon's review gave the film five out of ten, calling it stagnant in stretches (ComingSoon). The A.V. Club described it as semi-gothic and semi-erotic and said the cast leans into the strangeness (A.V. Club). CBR went the other way, praising Hathaway's performance as wickedly fun and the reason the movie holds together (CBR). The one thing critics seem to agree on is that Hathaway is the best part, which is good news for the Verity box office.

One factor could lift the Verity box office past its forecasts: walk-up business. Deadline reported that Hoover fans turning up on opening day could push the domestic total above tracking, and movies aimed at women have generally over-performed in recent years. Previews begin Thursday afternoon, so the first real signal arrives before the weekend even starts.

The wider context is that October is turning into a real battleground month, with Universal crossing a $5 billion global milestone and September's record-breaking openings still fresh, including Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But this weekend belongs to two very different gambles: a mid-budget R-rated thriller riding its star's hot streak, and a nine-figure auteur satire limping into the ring. If the Verity box office holds its target, it will confirm that Hathaway, not Cruise, is the box office story of the year.