Spooky season’s first big box office weekend has a clear winner, and it isn’t the movie star. Colleen Hoover’s Verity is running away with the top spot, while Tom Cruise’s Digger is digging itself into the worst opening he’s had in nearly two decades.
First, the fine print: everything below is based on early Friday industry estimates. Final weekend figures arrive Sunday, and these numbers can still move in either direction.
Verity is beating its own forecast. Amazon MGM Studios’ R-rated thriller pulled in roughly $14.5 million on Friday, a total that includes $4.5 million from Thursday previews. Industry projections now have it opening to around $32 million from 3,510 theaters, comfortably ahead of the $27 million to $30 million the studio had forecast. Not bad at all for a film with a reported $40 million production budget.
If you need a refresher (or a look at the trailer), Michael Showalter directs Dakota Johnson as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired to ghostwrite for bestselling author Verity Crawford, played by Anne Hathaway, with Josh Hartnett rounding out the central trio. Those Thursday previews were the second-best ever for a Hoover adaptation, trailing only It Ends With Us, which earned $7 million in previews on its way to a $50 million opening.
Critics? Not so much. Verity sits at 39 percent with Rotten Tomatoes reviewers. But Hoover fans have never needed critics’ permission. Audiences, led largely by women, have scored her recent adaptations far more generously, with It Ends With Us, Reminders of Him and Regretting You all landing between 83 and 87 percent.
Digger is a different story. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s satire, starring Cruise as an audacious oil tycoon dealing with a natural disaster of his own making, is tracking toward about $10 million from 3,321 theaters, with some projections dipping into the high single digits. Warner Bros. had been hoping for $12 million to $15 million. The film collected $1.2 million in Thursday previews, and its reported budget falls somewhere between $125 million and more than $160 million.
If that $10 million holds, it would be Cruise’s lowest opening in 19 years. You have to go back to 2007’s Lions for Lambs, the Robert Redford-directed drama that opened to $6.7 million, to find a softer start for the star.
There are a few bright spots. Audiences have been kinder than critics, giving the film a 71 percent audience score against a split 52 percent from reviewers. Warner Bros. is also positioning Digger, which co-stars Riz Ahmed, John Goodman and Sandra Hüller, as an awards contender and is counting on word of mouth to give it a longer life in theaters. (We weighed in on whether it earns that buzz in our review of Digger.)
The timing couldn’t be rougher for the studio. Digger lands just as Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are exiting ahead of the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. merger, which is expected to close Oct. 6.
Elsewhere in the early top five, Sony’s Resident Evil is projected at about $11.5 million in its third weekend, Paramount’s The Heart of the Beast sits close behind at around $10.3 million, Digger lands in fourth, and A24’s Primetime rounds things out with roughly $7.6 million.
So, where did your ticket money go this weekend: Hoover’s twisty page-turner or Cruise’s oil-slicked satire? Tell us, and check back Sunday when the final numbers land.
