Verity Digger box office results: Hathaway Tops Cruise

The Verity Digger box office results are in, and the first weekend of October belongs to the thriller. Amazon MGM's Verity, adapted from Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel, seized the number-one spot with an estimated $33 million opening weekend after pulling in $15 million on opening day across 3510 locations, according to TheWrap. Variety's independently reported figures describe the same hierarchy, with nearly identical numbers for both films. Sitting just below it on the chart, Warner Bros. and Legendary's Digger managed only about $7.5 million for the weekend after a $3.4 million Friday from 3321 locations, including IMAX screens. Both totals are still projections; final grosses will be confirmed when the studios report actuals.

The Verity Digger box office results matter more than usual because the two films cost wildly different amounts to make. Verity was produced on a reported $40 million budget, TheWrap says, which leaves Amazon MGM positioned to turn a modest theatrical profit before the film finds its second life with streaming audiences on Prime Video. Digger, by contrast, carried a budget of at least $125 million, with some reports pushing the final spend to $160 million. That arithmetic turns a soft opening into a genuine crisis: the film is now Tom Cruise's lowest opening weekend since 2007, when the war drama Lions for Lambs — co-starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep — debuted to $6.7 million.

TheWrap even draws the comparison to Babylon, Paramount's pricey misfire that made only $65.2 million worldwide yet found a cult following afterward, suggesting Digger's reassessment, if it comes, will take years. It is also, fittingly or otherwise, the final film Warner Bros. will release before the Paramount acquisition closes.

A Tale of Two Audiences

The Verity Digger box office results underline a lesson studios already know: built-in audiences win opening weekends. The adaptation, directed by Michael Showalter and starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, arrived with a readership that had been waiting since the first trailer dropped. Deadline reports it is already the second-best opening for a Hoover novel on the big screen, behind only It Ends With Us, and that the opening-day crowd was 79 percent female. Reviewers were far less smitten: TheWrap notes the film earned a C+ CinemaScore — the same grade Fifty Shades of Grey once received on its way to a perfectly healthy run, Deadline points out — with Rotten Tomatoes scores of 34 percent from critics and 69 percent from audiences. (We covered the film's first trailer when it dropped last month.)

For many fans For many fans of Hoover's book, who made up a large share of that early audience, the film apparently lacked the creepy, steamy thrills of the source material, TheWrap reports.

The Verity Digger box office results also tell a story about appetite: Digger's problem is arithmetic. (We previously debunked the viral theory that the film hides a secret musical.) Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the R-rated black comedy casts Cruise as a powerful oil tycoon whose company triggers an ecological calamity, Deadline reports. Critics and audiences met it with a collective shrug: TheWrap records a C+ CinemaScore alongside Rotten Tomatoes scores of 51 percent from critics and 71 percent from audiences. Not even a full-court press tour — a GQ cover, a New Heights podcast appearance, a Jennifer Hudson Show stunt — could move the needle, Deadline's reporting notes, and the film's early Oscar hopes for Cruise now read as wishful thinking.

What the Weekend Says About Theaters

For the trade press, the Verity Digger box office results are the latest data point in a familiar pattern. Zoom out and the frame looks healthier than its two headliners suggest. The overall weekend ran about 17 percent ahead of the same frame last year, per TheWrap, marking the third straight hundred-million-dollar-plus fall weekend. Sony's Resident Evil added a sturdy $12.5 million in its third weekend, while Paramount's Heart of the Beast and A24's Primetime rounded out a top five that mostly behaved the way October usually does. The industry's takeaway will be the familiar one: adaptations with devoted readerships arrive with opening weekends pre-loaded, while expensive auteur swings increasingly ask audiences to take a chance they are unwilling to take.

The final Verity Digger box office results confirm a weekend of two opposite fates. Verity's lukewarm audience grades suggest it could be frontloaded, yet its modest budget means it hardly needs long legs to justify itself. Digger needs an overseas rescue or a very long second life; otherwise it will stand as the priciest cautionary tale of the fall — and an awkward farewell card for Warner Bros. as a standalone studio.