Box Office Finals: Verity Holds at $32.6M as Cruise’s Digger Locks In a Disastrous $8M Debut

The actuals are in, and they changed nothing — which is exactly the story. Monday’s final box office numbers for the October 2–4 weekend confirmed what Sunday’s estimates already told Hollywood: Verity, a $40 million Colleen Hoover adaptation, beat Tom Cruise’s Digger, a $160-million-plus studio satire, by four to one. Verity finished at $32.6 million domestic and $62.1 million worldwide, while Digger limped home at $8 million domestic and $20 million worldwide — a fifth-place debut that Deadline called Cruise’s lowest opening in 19 years.

01 The Finals: Verity Holds, Digger Stays Buried

Monday’s actuals brought one small adjustment: Verity’s worldwide total settled at $62.1 million, per Deadline’s Monday update, a hair below Sunday’s $62.6 million estimate. Everything else landed exactly where the studios had called it. The domestic chart (final figures via Rentrak, as reported by the Associated Press) reads like a lesson in budgeting:

1. Verity — $32.6 million (Week 1)
2. Resident Evil — $12.5 million (Week 3)
3. Heart of the Beast — $11 million (Week 2)
4. Primetime — $8 million (Week 2)
5. Digger — $8 million (Week 1)
6. Forgotten Island — $7.2 million (Week 2)
7. Avengers: Endgame Encore — $4.4 million
8. Drishyam: The Conclusion — $2.7 million
9. Practical Magic 2 — $2.7 million
10. Spider-Man: Brand New Day — $2.5 million

The tightest battle was fourth versus fifth: Primetime edged Digger despite both films rounding to $8 million — one outlet noted the two could flip on actuals, but the fifth-place finish for a Tom Cruise blockbuster stuck. On 3,321 screens, Digger managed a per-theater average of roughly $2,409, a number that would be rough for an indie and is catastrophic for a nine-figure production. Overseas added just $12 million from 74 international markets, per Variety’s reporting.

Verity, by contrast, behaved like a hit. Amazon MGM’s R-rated psychological thriller — starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett — outgrossed the No. 2 and No. 3 films combined domestically. Deadline reported that 78% of its opening audience was female, while Amazon’s foreign offices said it also pulled in men and non-readers — the rare book adaptation that escaped the book-reading audience. It opened at No. 1 in the U.K. ($4.5 million on 950 screens), Brazil ($3.8 million) and Australia ($3.1 million), and finished second in Mexico. That $62.1 million global bow is Hoover’s second-best worldwide opening in like-for-like comparisons, behind only the $95.6 million that It Ends With Us earned in 2024.

For the full weekend-to-weekend story, see our original estimates report — and how a sub-$100 million weekend still kept 2026 ahead of last year’s pace.

02 A Tale of Two Budgets

The grosses tell one story; the budgets tell the real one. Verity carried a net production cost of $40 million, per Deadline — meaning its $62.1 million worldwide opening already puts it on a comfortable path to profitability, with weeks of play ahead.

Digger is a different animal entirely. Variety reported that Warner Bros. greenlit the film at $125 million, but the budget ballooned to $160–180 million after production ran long — though a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson disputed that the film required that much. The studio had hoped for an $18–20 million opening; Variety quoted box office experts saying a debut near $40 million was needed for the economics to work. Instead it opened at $8 million, and rivals told the outlet the final could land closer to $7.5 million once Monday’s numbers were fully tallied.

Deadline’s analysis projected Digger will lose around $150 million. The film earned a C+ CinemaScore (the same grade Verity received) and sits at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s black comedy stars Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an unethical oil tycoon scrambling to contain an ecological disaster, alongside John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Jesse Plemons and Sandra Hüller. Franchise Re analyst David A. Gross summed up the mismatch to Variety: black comedies are typically small films, and Digger is not a small film.

It also arrived at a uniquely awkward moment: as the Associated Press noted, Digger is Warner Bros.’ final release as an independent studio before the Paramount acquisition closes on Tuesday. The last thing on the marquee before the lights change is a $150-million write-down.

03 What Hollywood Takes Into October

Start with the star. Deadline reported that Digger’s $8 million start is Tom Cruise’s lowest opening in 19 years — industry coverage noted he hasn’t opened this softly since Lions for Lambs ($6.7 million) in 2007. That is not a commentary on Cruise’s bankability as much as on the bet itself: a dense, twisty political satire sold on auteur prestige and a mystery-marketing campaign, priced like a summer tentpole. Even the film’s defenders — Guillermo del Toro called it “daring, bold and cinematically complex” on social media, per Far Out — were arguing for its artistry, not its commerciality.

Then the counter-lesson: fandom shows up. Hoover’s built-in readership — the engine behind It Ends With Us’s $95.6 million opening in 2024 — did it again, turning a mid-budget thriller into the weekend’s dominant story. It’s the same math that’s powering October’s broader slate: Sony’s The Social Reckoning is tracking $8–10 million for next weekend, per 411mania, with Angel Studios’ Angel and the Badman in low single digits.

The bigger picture keeps flashing green. Rentrak’s Paul Dergarabedian told the AP that the weekend’s roughly $99 million domestic total was down 21% from the last September weekend but up 14.8% over the same frame last year — and that 27 of the first 40 weekends of 2026 have topped $100 million. Year-to-date domestic ticket sales hit $7.949 billion, 19.4% ahead of the $6.654 billion at this point in 2025, and only about $50.8 million shy of the $8 billion mark, which Dergarabedian expects the industry to reach around October 9.

One more milestone buried in the chart: Avengers: Endgame Encore reclaimed the title of highest-grossing film of all time, nudging past Avatar $2.9255 billion to $2.9237 billion worldwide, not adjusting for inflation. The record is trivia; the $8 billion mark is business. And this weekend proved, again, that in 2026 the business rewards the $40 million bet built for its audience — not the $180 million bet built for its director.

Previously’s ongoing Digger coverage digs into how the marketing campaign — and the bigger question of Cruise’s movie-star math — set up this weekend’s collapse.