Colleen Hoover's 'Verity' Is Burying Tom Cruise's 'Digger' at the Box Office

"Verity" took $15.1 million on Friday, while Cruise's "Digger" made $3.4 million and ran third, behind "Resident Evil."

Colleen Hoover's "Verity" opened at No. 1 on Friday. It earned more than four times what Tom Cruise's "Digger" made on its first day in theaters.

Amazon MGM's take on Hoover's bestseller pulled in $15.1 million at 3,510 theaters across North America, Variety reported. Warner Bros.' "Digger," playing on nearly as many screens, made $3.4 million and ran third, behind "Resident Evil," Sony's zombie holdover.

Split across all those screens, Friday looked even worse for Cruise: roughly $4,300 a theater for "Verity," roughly $1,000 for "Digger." Variety's weekend estimates had "Verity" on its way to $33.6 million and "Digger" to just $7.5 million.

"Verity" is the fourth Hoover novel to reach theaters in three years, and each one has landed at a different studio. Sony put out "It Ends With Us" in 2024, Paramount had "Regretting You" in 2025 and Universal released "Reminders of Him" earlier this year.

Michael Showalter directed the new one. Anne Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, a famous novelist left badly hurt by a car crash, and Dakota Johnson is the struggling writer her husband, played by Josh Hartnett, brings in to finish her books.

For Cruise, this kind of weekend hasn't come around in a long time. "Digger" is heading for his lowest opening in 19 years, the Globe reported. Deadline put his last start that soft at "Lions for Lambs." He's the same star who carried the "Mission: Impossible" series and "Top Gun: Maverick."

He didn't coast, either. The promotional push ran from a GQ cover to a "Risky Business"-style slide down the spirit tunnel on "The Jennifer Hudson Show." It couldn't outrun the reviews. Alejandro González Iñárritu's R-rated black comedy casts Cruise as an oil tycoon whose company sets off an environmental disaster, and it opened to a wave of bad notices and mixed word of mouth, Variety reported.

The Globe found critics split on the film but few of them blaming Cruise. That's cold comfort next to the bill. Warner Bros. greenlit "Digger" at $125 million, Variety said. The reported cost then climbed to between $160 million and $180 million after the shoot ran long, Variety said, citing people with knowledge of the production.

Theater owners keep a share of every ticket, so the studio gets back only part of each dollar the film grosses. Variety counts "Digger" alongside "The Bride!" and "Supergirl" among Warner Bros.' misses this year.

Elsewhere on Friday's chart, Paramount's "The Heart of the Beast," with Brad Pitt as a veteran stranded in the Alaskan wilds with his combat dog after a plane crash, made $3.15 million, Variety reported. A24's "Primetime," a Robert Pattinson drama about Chris Hansen's years hosting "To Catch a Predator," was fifth with $2.49 million. The real Hansen isn't a fan: he called the film "so bizarre and so in-and-out of reality," Variety reported.

Warner Bros. is already changing its pitch. A new "Digger" ad leans on praise from critics overseas, The Hollywood Reporter found, which means the studio is selling its movie with reviews from outside the country where it just finished third on opening day.

Source: variety.com, retrieved October 4, 2026.