Verity, the Colleen Hoover thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, is playing in about 500 fewer North American theaters this weekend, its third in release. Box office trackers reported the cut on Friday, October 16. The trim comes with the film at $120.1 million worldwide on a reported $40 million budget, so this is a routine pullback for a profitable movie rather than a rescue.
Amazon MGM Studios opened the film on October 2 in 3,510 theaters and widened it to 3,572 for its second weekend. Taking 500 off that peak leaves roughly 3,070 venues, a cut of about 14%.
How a theater count actually shrinks
A theater count is simply the number of venues showing a film in a given week, and it moves in both directions; Verity’s went up by 62 before this cut. The clearest way to read the pullback is per-location earnings, because a screen holding a fading title is a screen a new release cannot use.
Its opening weekend brought in $32.03 million, or $9,126 per theater. The second weekend fell 63% to $12.01 million, with the per-theater average down to $3,361. By Thursday, October 15, the film took $1.0 million across all 3,572 locations, about $280 each. Meanwhile, this weekend’s newcomers include Paramount’s Street Fighter, tracked to open between $25 million and $35 million, and 20th Century’s Whalefall, and both need screens.
For comparison, Warner Bros.’ Digger, which opened the same day, earned $8 million from 3,321 screens and then just $964 per screen in its second weekend.
Where Verity sits among Hoover adaptations
Our arithmetic from the published daily figures: Verity had $59.88 million in the US and Canada through Thursday, and 53.5% of that came in the first three days. Overseas markets have added $60.24 million, so the film is split almost exactly in half between domestic and international ticket sales. Worldwide, it has grossed three times its production budget.
It opened well below It Ends with Us, the 2024 Hoover adaptation that debuted with $50 million, and well above Reminders of Him, which started at $17.97 million earlier this year and finished at $48.55 million in North America. Verity passed that lifetime total during its second week. Its opening audience was 78% female, with 25- to 34-year-olds the largest age group at 38%.
Reviews were never the draw. Around 31% of 180 critics’ reviews counted were positive, and opening-night audiences gave it a C+.
The trailer, and what it promised
Amazon MGM Studios’ official trailer runs 2 minutes and 24 seconds. It leans heavily on mood: snowbound woods and a frozen lake behind a title card announcing the film is based on the best-selling novel, Johnson holding a mug by a window, and a cool, beige interview scene between the two leads. It closes with Hathaway’s face glimpsed through the letters of her own name and then the title.
As marketing, it worked on the audience it was cut for. The trailer sells the book first and the stars second, which fits an opening crowd that was nearly four-fifths women and drawn by the Hoover name. It also keeps Hathaway mostly in shadow and at a distance, which protects the central mystery of whether Verity Crawford can move or speak.
The trouble is the gap between that promise and the reaction. The trailer plays the story as a slow-burning gothic puzzle; the C+ grade and a second-weekend drop of 63% suggest the payoff did not land for many of the people who bought tickets. A trailer that hides its ending well can fill seats for one weekend, but it cannot change what people tell their friends on the way out.
The international rollout continues, with South Korea opening on October 22 and Japan on November 6. In between, on October 29, Tokyo’s 39th international film festival shows it as a Gala selection.
Further reading
Image: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
