Colleen Hoover’s “Verity” Devours the Box Office With a $62M Worldwide Debut as Cruise’s “Digger” Flops

LOS ANGELES — The weekend box office delivered a clean verdict: audiences showed up for Colleen Hoover and stayed away from Tom Cruise’s dramatic pivot. “Verity,” the Amazon MGM thriller starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, opened at No. 1 with a $62 million worldwide debut — $32.6 million in North America and roughly $30 million across 71 international territories, per Comscore estimates reported by RMN News — one of the strongest autumn thriller openings in recent years. Meanwhile “Digger,” Cruise’s first non-action film since 2017’s “American Made,” managed just $8 million domestic, landing at No. 5 in one of the most expensive flops of 2026.

The headline is the split. In the same weekend, a mid-October thriller built on a book fandom outperformed a nine-figure Tom Cruise vehicle by four to one domestically — and the gap tells you everything about where movie stardom sits in 2026. Audiences still pay for a story they’re already invested in. They no longer pay simply because Tom Cruise is in the frame.

The Hoover machine“Verity” by the numbers

The Colleen Hoover business remains one of the most reliable engines in publishing-to-film. “Verity”’s $32.6 million domestic start lands below the $50 million launch of “It Ends With Us” but comfortably above “Reminders of Him” ($18 million) and “Regretting You” ($13.7 million), making it the second-biggest Hoover adaptation debut to date. That’s not a fluke — it’s a pattern. Hoover’s readers show up the way Marvel fans used to: on opening weekend, in groups, pre-committed.

The international numbers are what make the $62 million figure genuinely impressive. Roughly $30 million from 71 territories suggests the film is playing like a genuine four-quadrant thriller overseas rather than a domestic-only book fandom event. Amazon MGM, which backed the film, now has a clear runway — thrillers like this tend to leg out with strong word of mouth, and a $62 million global start on an autumn release is the kind of opening that turns a solid hit into a franchise conversation. Hoover has plenty more shelves of material.

And then there’s the star at the center of it. Hathaway’s “Verity” caps one of the most prolific years any working actor has had: five new releases, including “Mother Mary,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “The Odyssey” and “The End of Oak Street.” USA Today notes that “The Odyssey” is the No. 2 highest-grossing film of the year worldwide — so Hathaway has now anchored both an awards-adjacent epic and an autumn thriller hit in the same calendar year. That’s a run.

The “Digger” disaster$8 million on a nine-figure bet

For “Digger,” the math is brutal and it doesn’t get better on the second look. Warner Bros.’ disaster-movie satire from Alejandro G. Iñárritu — the “Birdman” and “The Revenant” director — casts Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an aging oil tycoon, in a transformative performance that was supposed to launch his post-“Mission: Impossible” dramatic era and fuel an Oscar campaign. Instead it opened to $8 million domestic and $20 million worldwide, according to studio estimates released by Rentrak on Sunday.

The Hollywood Reporter pegs the budget at $125 million; Variety estimates $160 million to $180 million, a figure Warner Bros. disputes. Take either number and the outcome is the same: a $20 million worldwide opening on a nine-figure budget is a hole no leg of business can fill. Mixed reviews, as USA Today reported, only sealed the verdict — the Oscar buzz that had trailed the film into release now has to survive a box office number that voters can’t unsee.

For Cruise, this is uncharted territory in the wrong direction. It’s the actor’s worst opening weekend at the box office in years — even 2017’s “The Mummy,” the flop that killed Universal’s shared-monsters franchise before it started, still opened to $31 million, nearly four times “Digger”’s number. Landing at No. 5 for the weekend, behind older releases like “Resident Evil” and “Primetime,” means “Digger” didn’t just miss — it was never in the race.

The pivotWhat this means for Cruise

The deeper story isn’t one bad weekend; it’s the pivot that backfired. With the “Mission: Impossible” franchise behind him, Cruise spent the last year signaling he wanted the industry to take him seriously as a dramatic actor — the awards-caliber performer the Oscars have never quite gotten around to honoring. “Digger” was the statement: a director-driven satire, a physically transformed performance, a role with zero stunts to hide behind.

Hollywood has seen this movie before — the action star who ages into prestige and finds the audience doesn’t follow. The risk was always that Cruise’s brand is the mission, the stunt, the running — remove the apparatus and what’s left is a very good movie star without a proven dramatic box office base. An $8 million opening suggests the apparatus was doing more of the lifting than anyone wanted to admit.

There’s a bounce-back already on the calendar. Cruise has lined up “Days of Thunder 2,” scheduled for summer 2028, with Hathaway — of all people — as his co-star. The symmetry is almost too neat: the two biggest names of this weekend, one coming off a $62 million hit and the other off an $8 million disaster, will share a cockpit in two years. If anyone needed proof that Hollywood is a small town with a long memory, it’s that casting announcement.

An era endsThe last Warner Bros. release before the merger

“Digger” also closes an era on a sour note: it is set to be the last film released by Warner Bros. before its merger with Paramount Skydance. The deal closed Tuesday, October 6, creating the new giant called Skydance — and the regime that greenlit “Digger” won’t be the regime that lives with the write-down. Warner film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are out as the new company’s Paramount-side leadership takes over the combined slate.

There’s a certain poetry to it, if you like dark poetry. The old Warner Bros. — the studio that bet on director-driven swings — exits the stage with a director-driven swing that missed by nine figures. The new Skydance has pledged at least 30 theatrical films a year, but the mandate, per everything the new leadership has signaled, is franchise reliability over auteur gambles. “Digger” may be the last of its species. Read our full story on the $110 billion merger and what it means for Hollywood.

The wider weekendHoldovers and a new all-time king

Around the two newcomers, the holdovers did their steady business: “Resident Evil” continued its run with $125 million domestic and $246.4 million worldwide, while “Heart of the Beast” stood at $38.3 million domestic and $98.6 million worldwide. Both finished ahead of “Digger” in its opening frame — a fact that will live in infamy in the Cruise filmography.

And in the weekend’s quietest blockbuster story, “Avengers: Endgame” is once again the king of the box office world. According to Disney, the Marvel blockbuster’s “Encore” re-release has pushed its worldwide haul to $2.9255 billion, surpassing “Avatar” to become the highest-grossing movie of all time globally, not adjusted for inflation. “Endgame” previously held the title for about two years, from 2019 until “Avatar” reclaimed the record with its own 2021 re-release. Records, it turns out, are made to be re-released.

The takeaway from the weekend is a familiar 2026 lesson, delivered twice. Audiences will still open a movie — “Verity” proved that with a $62 million roar. But they won’t open anything. A star, a budget and a visionary director used to be enough. Now the audience needs a reason, and “Digger” never gave them one.