Verity Tops Weekend Box Office With $32.6M as Tom Cruise's Digger Stumbles at No. 5

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2026 — Verity topped the domestic box office this weekend with $32.6 million, while Tom Cruise's Digger cratered. The Colleen Hoover thriller, starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett, led all movies in North America for the frame of October 2-4, according to industry estimates released Sunday — quadrupling the opening of the week's other big release.

The gap was brutal. Digger — the Warner Bros./Legendary comedy starring Cruise as an oil tycoon, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu — managed just $8 million in fifth place, a disastrous debut for a film reported to have cost $125-160 million. The opening arrives after a week of negative reviews and shaky audience buzz, and the film earned a C+ CinemaScore, per weekend reporting. Cruise's star power, which has carried the box office for four decades, could not save a movie that audiences simply didn't dig.

Here is the full top 10 for the weekend, per industry estimates: Verity at $32.6 million, Resident Evil at $12.5 million in its third week, Heart of the Beast at $11 million in its second weekend, Primetime at roughly $8.5 million, Digger at $8 million, Forgotten Island at $7.2 million, the Avengers: Endgame re-release at $4.4 million, Drishyam – The Conclusion at $2.7 million, Practical Magic 2 at $2.6 million, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day at $2.4 million.

Verity and the Hoover machine

Verity, adapted from Colleen Hoover's bestselling psychosexual thriller novel, is directed by Michael Showalter — best known for The Big Sick, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and Wet Hot American Summer — and produced on a reported $40 million budget. It opened in roughly 3,510 theaters, meaning the per-theater average was just over $9,200, a strong number for an adult-skewing thriller opening in October.

The film is the latest win for the Hoover adaptation machine, which has already delivered It Ends With Us, Regretting You, and Reminders of Him to theaters. Hoover's books come with a built-in, fiercely loyal audience — mostly younger women — that has reliably turned out opening weekend, and Verity followed the playbook. The film also earned a C+ CinemaScore, suggesting the moviegoing crowd found it merely okay — but on a $40 million budget, opening weekend alone nearly covers the production cost, and the math gets better from here.

The cast is the marquee. Hathaway plays the injured, possibly-manipulative author Verity Crawford opposite Johnson as Lowen Ashleigh, the struggling writer hired to finish her book series, and Hartnett as Verity's husband Jeremy. The novel's readers know exactly how twisted this story gets — the book's infamous "twist" has been debated on BookTok for years — and the film's early reception suggests it plays that mystery straight for an audience that arrived already invested.

Digger's very expensive hole

For Digger, the numbers are the opposite of the story Warner Bros. wanted to tell. The political comedy stars Cruise as Rockwell, an oil tycoon — a deliberate pivot from the action fare that has defined his last decade, from Top Gun: Maverick through the final Mission: Impossible. The film's unusual structure includes a play-within-the-film, reportedly titled Fossil Fools, and the project was sold as Cruise and Iñárritu's prestige collaboration — a career swing for both men.

Instead, the swing missed. A week of negative reviews killed the buzz, and the C+ CinemaScore indicates the audiences who did show up weren't won over. At $8 million from a wide release on a nine-figure budget, Digger is headed for one of the most expensive comedy flops in recent memory. Warner Bros.' already-difficult year at the box office now has its most visible casualty.

It's worth noting the asymmetry in expectations: even if Cruise is, as we wrote this week, the last true movie star, stardom has limits. A $125-160 million comedy — that genre on that budget — is an almost impossible economic proposition unless the film is a genuine cultural event. Digger arrived as neither event nor crowd-pleaser, and the audience arithmetic is unforgiving: the film would need something like a $300-400 million worldwide run to break even, a number that looks out of reach.

The rest of the field

Below the new releases, the holdovers kept the chart full. Resident Evil clung to second with $12.5 million in its third week — an excellent hold for the franchise reboot — while Heart of the Beast took third with $11 million in its second weekend. Primetime held fourth with about $8.5 million, just ahead of Digger.

Further down, Forgotten Island managed $7.2 million, and the Avengers: Endgame re-release — tagged with around six minutes of extra footage and the "Encore" subtitle — pulled $4.4 million, continuing a remarkable two-week run for a seven-year-old movie. The Indian crime drama Drishyam – The Conclusion opened at about $2.7 million in the North American frame even as it dominated headlines in India, and Practical Magic 2 ($2.6 million) and Spider-Man: Brand New Day ($2.4 million) closed out the top 10.

The takeaway from the weekend is a familiar Hollywood lesson with a 2026 twist: the built-in audience beats the auteur gamble. Verity is a modestly budgeted adaptation of a novel millions of people have read, marketed directly to them, and it did exactly the business it was supposed to do. Digger is a hugely expensive, deliberately odd comedy that asked general audiences to show up for two auteurs' passion project — and they declined. Both earned C+ CinemaScores; only one needed to.

Our film desk has the full story on Cruise's Digger era, and the streaming desk tracked Russell Crowe's Netflix chart-topper this week.