"Verity," Amazon MGM Studios' big-screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover's 2018 psychological thriller, opened at No. 1 over the weekend, taking in an estimated $32.6 million from 3,510 North American theaters and roughly $62 million worldwide, according to distributor estimates reported by TheWrap. The debut makes "Verity" the second-biggest domestic opening yet for a Hoover adaptation, trailing only 2024's "It Ends With Us."
The film built toward that number gradually: roughly $4 million in Thursday night previews, about $15 million on Friday alone, and a Saturday hold strong enough to push its three-day estimate past Amazon MGM's own pre-release projection of $27 million to $30 million. Audiences buying tickets were overwhelmingly women, who accounted for an estimated 78 to 79 percent of the opening-weekend crowd.
Directed by Michael Showalter from a screenplay by Nick Antosca, "Verity" stars Anne Hathaway as Verity Crawford, a bestselling novelist left unable to speak or move after a car crash, and Dakota Johnson as Lowen Ashleigh, the struggling writer hired to finish the remaining books in Verity's contract, who begins to suspect a dark secret hidden in Verity's unfinished memoir. Josh Hartnett plays Verity's husband, Jeremy, with Asel Swango and Daniel Echevarria in supporting roles.
A Franchise Built on Word of Mouth
Hoover, a Texas-based novelist who self-published her early work before becoming one of the best-selling authors of the past decade, has turned into an unlikely engine for mid-budget studio filmmaking. "It Ends With Us," the first adaptation of one of her novels, opened to roughly $50 million domestically in 2024 and went on to gross well over $300 million worldwide, prompting studios to option more of her backlist. "Verity," made for a reported $40 million, is the latest result of that chase, and a solid one: for Amazon MGM, the opening offers a needed win after the costly misfire of this summer's "Masters of the Universe." It also easily outpaced its chief new competition, Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu's "Digger," which stumbled to roughly a $7.5 million opening.
Critics Pan It; Audiences Are Still Deciding
Reviews have been largely unkind. Writing in Variety, one critic called the film "a flat-footed dud, at once overwrought and underplotted," arguing that Johnson's passive screen presence is an asset only in the right film and that Hathaway is frozen in a role that demands little of her beyond stillness. TheWrap was more forgiving, describing the film's tonal whiplash as something like an "I Love Mess" meme crossed with a contemporary erotic thriller, and crediting Hathaway for leaning into camp even where the production itself holds back.
Several reviewers converged on a similar complaint: that a story built on domestic menace and an author's buried secrets plays it too safe on screen, never fully committing to the trashy, pulpy energy that made Hoover's novel a social-media sensation in the first place. Opening-night moviegoers, for their part, handed the film a C+ on CinemaScore, a grade distribution analysts have read as a sign the weekend's total may be front-loaded rather than built on the kind of sustained word-of-mouth that carried "It Ends With Us" through the fall of 2024.
That distinction matters for what comes next. Hoover's novels have built their audiences on BookTok and in book clubs rather than at test screenings, and that readership has proven, twice now, that it can move people into theaters on opening weekend regardless of what critics decide. Whether "Verity" can hold its audience through a second and third weekend, rather than falling off sharply the way a front-loaded opening would suggest, will shape how aggressively studios keep adapting the rest of Hoover's catalog.
