"Verity," the thriller adaptation pairing Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, opened in theaters Friday to a strong first day at the box office but a critical reception far cooler than its starry cast might suggest.
The film, directed by Michael Showalter from a screenplay by Nick Antosca, took in $15.1 million on its opening day domestically, according to The Numbers, on a reported $40 million budget for distributor Amazon MGM Studios. Industry forecasters had circled the film as a potential sleeper hit heading into the fall season, betting on the popularity of its source material and the pairing of two of Hollywood's more bankable actresses, as SlashFilm noted ahead of release.
That source material is Colleen Hoover's 2018 novel of the same name, the latest of the bestselling author's books to make the jump to film following adaptations such as "It Ends With Us." The story follows Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer played by Johnson, who is hired to finish the book series of Verity Crawford (Hathaway), a bestselling novelist left catatonic after a car accident. Moving into the Crawford family's lakeside Vermont home, Lowen discovers an unfinished autobiography containing disturbing confessions, and the film unspools through a series of unreliable narrators whose credibility is never fully settled. Josh Hartnett plays Verity's husband, Jeremy, and Ismael Cruz Córdova rounds out the principal cast.
Principal photography ran from February to April 2025, and the production reportedly shot an alternate ending that was ultimately dropped after test screenings in favor of the version now in theaters.
Reviews Split Sharply From the Box Office Numbers
Critics were considerably more divided than opening-day audiences. The film held a 34 percent positive rating from critics and a 45 out of 100 score on Metacritic as of the weekend, according to aggregated reviews on Wikipedia's tracking of the film's reception. Some critics embraced the film's pulpy excess, while others dismissed its plotting as increasingly far-fetched as the twists piled up in the back half.
The mixed reviews echo a pattern that has followed other recent Hoover adaptations, where strong readership and star power have not always translated into critical goodwill. Whether that split affects the film's performance over its full opening weekend and beyond will become clearer as final box office figures are tallied in the coming days.
