Verity tops Digger as Cruise's $125M bet implodes — SkimNews
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- Verity pulled $4.5M in previews tracking a $30M–$35M opening — Anne Hathaway's third chart-topper after The Odyssey and The Devil Wears Prada 2.link ›
- Digger earned just $1.2M in previews against a $125M+ budget (some reports say past $160M), putting the Tom Cruise–Iñárritu climate satire in rare bomb territory.link ›
- Colleen Hoover's adaptation streak stays the hottest author-to-screen pipeline in Hollywood: It Ends With Us opened at $50M and grossed $350M globally.link ›
- Both the Guardian and Deadline called Digger the year's most disappointing film, comparing it unfavorably to Adam McKay's Don't Look Up.link ›
- Kacey Musgraves opened the 2026 MTV VMAs with a pre-taped 'I Will Always Love You' tribute to Dolly Parton, anchored by archival footage of Parton introducing the 1974 original.link ›
- 'NAZA', the Gaza documentary from Oscar-winning No Other Land directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, grossed roughly €1.1M ($1.2M) in its first two days in Italy — more than triple Avengers: Endgame Encore.link ›
- Peacock greenlit its first Fast & Furious TV series, with Vin Diesel exec producing and a 2028 premiere timed to the final film Fast Forever.link ›
- Andrew Scott plays Chariots of Fire star Ian Charleson in Simon Stone's Elsinore, which won at Telluride and opens via Focus Features on November 20.link ›
Colleen Hoover's author-to-screen pipeline keeps winning while Tom Cruise loses. Amazon MGM's $40M Verity pulled $4.5M in previews and is tracking a $30M-plus opening, while Cruise and Alejandro González Iñárritu's $125M (some say past $160M) climate satire Digger scraped $1.2M and is projected to land between $12M and $15M. Hoover's novels are now Hollywood's most reliable opening-weekend currency: It Ends With Us posted a $50M debut, and Verity is set to outpace both Regretting You and Reminders of Him. The Iñárritu film is already collecting pans calling it the year's most disappointing picture. The studio has asked audiences to judge for themselves over critics. The math has answered anyway.
The stories behind this week
Kacey Musgraves Honors Dolly Parton With 'I Will Always Love You'By airing a pre-taped duet just weeks after Parton's August death, MTV framed one of its biggest annual stages around mourning a generational country artist — and Musgraves, who has repeatedly covered Parton's catalog on tour and once shared the MusiCares stage with her, became the natural vehicle for that salute, anchoring a commercial awards show around a legacy tribute rather than a new release.
Review: Iñárritu's 'Digger' With Tom Cruise Is a DisappointingA new film from an Oscar-winning director carrying early awards buzz becomes a cautionary case for suspending critical objection in the name of climate relevance. With Cruise in a prosthetic-heavy transformative turn and a supporting cast of major names (Ahmed, Goodman, Hüller, Stuhlbarg), the project's commercial and prestige stakes are high even as the review calls it the year's most disappointing film.
Andrew Scott Plays Ian Charleson in 'Elsinore'For Scott, 'Elsinore' continues a deliberate pivot from 'Hot Priest' fame toward heavier dramatic work, following 'All of Us Strangers' and his solo 'Vanya.' With a TIFF audience award already secured and Focus Features opening it November 20, the film enters the prestige corridor with the kind of fact-based, actor-obsessed material that historically draws awards attention.
Box Office: ‘Verity’ Makes $4.5 Million in Previews, ‘Digger’ Behind With $1.2 MillionA $40M production tracking $30M+ means another cheap win for Amazon MGM's Colleen Hoover pipeline, while a $125M+ budget opening under $15M puts "Digger" in rare-failure territory for Tom Cruise — a one-two punch that underscores how reliably Hoover's novels convert to opening weekends and how steep the downside is when a star vehicle misfires.
‘NAZA’ Beats ‘Avengers: Endgame Encore’ to Top Italian Box OfficeA documentary about Gaza more than tripled a Marvel re-release's gross in its opening two days in Italy, and the €1.1 million haul on a deliberately limited event-style theatrical window signals unusually intense audience demand. The film's non-traditional distribution — IFC Center exclusive in the U.S., no studio sale, free Guardian streaming — gives it global reach that bypasses conventional theatrical gatekeepers entirely.
‘Fast & Furious’ TV Series Greenlit At PeacockAfter a decade of fan pressure, Vin Diesel only greenlit a TV expansion once Donna Langley took oversight of both Universal's film and TV operations. Peacock is betting a $7B-grossing franchise can translate to streaming, timing the series premiere to the same year as the final film.
Iran’s Mohammad Rasoulof & Japanese-Korean Filmmaker Mipo O To Receive Kurosawa Akira Award At Tokyo Film FestivalThe committee's decision to honor Rasoulof — who has been imprisoned and banned by the Iranian government — alongside Mipo O, who returned after a decade-long hiatus to box-office success, positions TIFF as a festival that simultaneously champions dissident cinema and re-energized Asian auteurs, while its parallel Kurosawa retrospective ties this year's awards to the festival's namesake legacy.
True Brit Entertainment Files for AdministrationThe collapse of a distributor backed by Three Six Zero and Matthew Vaughn's Marv puts at least two unreleased titles — Anthony Wonke's 'In the Shadows' and the Maika Monroe-led 'Victorian Psycho' — in limbo, marking another casualty for the U.K.'s independent theatrical market under three years from launch.
Why it matters: Hoover's adaptations have now produced four straight opening-weekend wins at a fraction of Cruise's $125M Digger, which is on pace to clear less than a tenth of its budget — a clean case that Hollywood's center of gravity has shifted from star vehicles to author brands.
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