Anne Hathaway's Verity tops the box office despite a C+ CinemaScore and 33% on Rotten Tomatoes
Verity opened at No. 1 with a C+ CinemaScore and 33 percent from critics. The record it broke is second place out of four, and its $40 million budget is already behind it.
Verity now holds a Colleen Hoover box-office record. It is the second-biggest opening any Hoover adaptation has ever had, and that sentence is in every headline this week. It describes a podium with four steps.
Amazon MGM's thriller, with Anne Hathaway as a bestselling novelist nobody is allowed to talk to and Dakota Johnson as the writer hired to finish her books, opened at No. 1 in North America on October 2. It beat a Tom Cruise film the same weekend. It did all that with a C+ CinemaScore and a 33 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes. Those are the parts the record headlines leave out.
The record has exactly three other entries
Four Hoover novels have reached cinemas as wide releases. It Ends With Us came in August 2024, Regretting You in October 2025, Reminders of Him in March 2026, and now Verity. Screen Rant's version is that Verity "breaks the post-It Ends With Us record". Translated, it beat the two films that came after the one it did not beat.
Opening weekends in North America, per The Numbers:
- It Ends With Us (2024): $50.0 million
- Verity (2026): $32.0 million
- Reminders of Him (2026): $18.0 million
- Regretting You (2025): $13.7 million
Second of four is a real result. So is the $18 million gap between first and second.
Even the opening number moved after Sunday
The figure that went around on Sunday was $32.6 million, the studio estimate that Deadline and Boxoffice Pro both reported. The actuals that The Numbers lists came in at $32,031,011. That is about $570,000 lower. The headlines stayed where they were.
The worldwide number has the same problem in miniature. Deadline puts Verity's global launch at $62.1 million; Boxoffice Pro has $62.6 million. The more interesting number is the one Verity is being measured against. Deadline now compares it with $95.6 million for It Ends With Us, "in like-for-likes". In August 2024, Screen Daily reported that film's global debut as $80 million. The benchmark Verity came second to has grown by more than $15 million in two years, and Deadline does not explain the adjustment.
A C+ film that is already past its budget
The grades are bad and the money is not. Here is what is on the record so far:
- Net production cost: $40 million, per Deadline. The Numbers lists the same budget.
- Thursday previews: $4.5 million. Friday, previews included, made $15.0 million. Sunday made $7.0 million.
- North America after six days: $40.4 million through Wednesday, October 7.
- Worldwide: $70.2 million in The Numbers' tally as of October 7–8.
- Audience: 78 percent female. The 25–34 bracket was the largest, at 38 percent (Boxoffice Pro).
- Abroad: No. 1 in the UK ($4.5 million), Germany ($3.8 million), Brazil and Australia, with Korea opening on October 22 and Japan on November 6.
- History: Shot in New York between February and April 2025, first dated for May 15, 2026, then moved to October.
The Cruise film that opened the same day, Digger, got exactly the same C+ from CinemaScore. It opened to $8.0 million. Verity opened to four times that.
Hoover films are cheap, and they pay for themselves
The two adaptations that came between It Ends With Us and Verity show how this business works. Reminders of Him cost $25 million and grossed $89.2 million worldwide. Regretting You cost $30 million and made $90.4 million. Neither opened big, and both paid for themselves several times over.
Their final North American totals were $48.6 million and $48.9 million. Verity is already at $40.4 million after six days. Unless the C+ crowd stops showing up, it will pass both of them within a couple of weeks. That would make "second-biggest Hoover film" true over the whole run as well as the opening weekend.
Hathaway and Johnson have the hit. The next Hathaway project with Cruise is Days of Thunder 2, which means the two stars of this weekend's winner and loser will be sharing a set.
What nobody knows yet
- How hard the second weekend falls. A C+ usually means a film was bought on curiosity, not on word of mouth. Friday was more than double Sunday.
- What "like-for-likes" means. Until Deadline spells out how $80 million became $95.6 million, the size of Verity's gap to It Ends With Us depends on which year's report you read.
- What Amazon spent selling it. The $40 million is the production cost. Marketing has not been disclosed.
- When it reaches Prime Video. Amazon has not announced a streaming date.
Critics gave Verity 33 percent. Audiences gave it a C+. The record it set is second place out of four. Its $40 million budget is already behind it.