Box Office: ‘Verity’ Makes $4.5 Million in Previews, ‘Digger’ Behind With $1.2 Million — SkimNews
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- Verity pulled $4.5M in previews and is tracking a $30M–$35M opening, which would land it at #1 and mark Anne Hathaway's third chart-topping debut after "The Odyssey" and "The Devil Wears Prada 2."
- Verity is an Amazon MGM adaptation of Colleen Hoover's novel, starring Hathaway as reclusive author Verity Crawford and Dakota Johnson as the ghostwriter hired to finish her manuscript, produced for $40M.
- Digger earned just $1.2M in previews and is projected to open at $12M–$15M against a $125M budget (reportedly ballooned past $160M), making it one of the year's biggest box office bombs.
- Digger stars Tom Cruise as an oil tycoon racing to avert a climate catastrophe and is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose team has leaned into poor reviews by asking audiences to judge for themselves.
- Colleen Hoover's adaptation streak remains the industry's hottest author-to-screen pipeline: "It Ends With Us" led the pack with a $50M opening and $350M global, and "Verity" is poised to outpace "Regretting You" ($13.6M) and "Reminders of Him" ($17M).
Why it matters: A $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.
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