Amazon Bets $40 Million That Verity Still Sells

Amazon MGM Studios opens Verity in U.S. theaters on Oct. 2 with a $40 million production budget and mixed reviews sitting in the low 40s. Late tracking still points to a $30 million to $35 million domestic opening for the first R-rated Colleen Hoover film.

That is the wager. Hoover’s 2018 thriller already taught a huge reading public to fight over its last pages, and the studio is asking those readers to buy a ticket they cannot rewind.

Amazon Is Betting $40 Million on Friday

The film is a wide theatrical play, not a quiet Prime drop. Amazon MGM is distributing in the United States and Canada on Oct. 2, the same date Sony is releasing the film internationally. Tom Cruise’s Digger arrives the same weekend, which leaves the Hoover title as the adult draw for people who want a house, a secret, and a movie star in a bad marriage.

Critics have not blessed the spend. Metacritic’s weighted score is 44 from 15 reviews, mixed or average. Rotten Tomatoes lists 43 percent of 53 reviews as positive, with an average grade of 5.2 out of 10. Those two tallies describe the same landing: a film reviewers will not sell for the studio.

THE OPENING WAGER

• The budget: Amazon MGM spent $40 million to make the picture.
• The tracking: Late forecasts cluster around a $30 million to $35 million domestic opening.
• The grade: Metacritic’s 44 from 15 critics sits next to a 43 percent Tomatometer from 53 reviews.
• The running time: The cut in U.S. listings is 1 hour 54 minutes and rated R.

A mid-30s open on $40 million would not match Hoover’s first theatrical hit, but it would beat the two follow-up romances and give Amazon a usable adult title for the fall. A miss in the teens would confirm what those later openings already hinted: the free pass from BookTok is smaller than it was in 2024.

A Ghostwriter Walks Into a Lake House

Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a published writer who cannot fill a bookstore. Anne Hathaway is Verity Crawford, the bestselling novelist whose series still has to ship after a car crash leaves her unable to work. Josh Hartnett is Jeremy, the husband who hires Lowen to finish the books and then lets her move into the family house to do it.

Lowen finds another manuscript while she is there, a private confession that makes Verity look monstrous, and the job turns into a question of who is lying. Johnson’s Lowen says, in one early jab, “I don’t read books you can buy in an airport.” The joke is on the movie, which is built from one of the most bought airport thrillers of the last decade.

Ismael Cruz Córdova plays Corey, Lowen’s agent. Brady Wagner is Crew, the couple’s surviving son. Alex Cooper appears as herself. Nick Antosca wrote the screenplay and produced, with Hathaway, Hoover, Michael Showalter, Stacey Sher, Jordana Mollick, and Alex Hedlund also producing. Johnson is an executive producer. The official trailer, posted by Amazon MGM Studios, sells the house, the manuscript, and Hathaway’s stare.

The tagline is blunt: “There is no light where we’re going.” Volker Bertelmann wrote the score, and Lakeshore Records issues the soundtrack on Oct. 2, the same day as the film.

Three Hoover Openings Already Told This Story

Verity is the fourth Hoover novel to reach theaters. The first three were PG-13 romances. This one is an R-rated erotic thriller, which is the point of the spend and the risk. Boxoffice Pro, laying out comps in September, noted that It Ends With Us opened at $50 million in 2024, then the next two Hoover titles came in much lower.

HOOVER FILMS AT THE DOMESTIC OPENING

The slide is the fact the marketing will not print. Hoover still sells books. The movies have not kept the first opening. Boxoffice Pro grouped Verity with other secret-marriage thrillers, including A Simple Favor at $16 million, The Housemaid at $19 million, and The Girl on the Train at $24.5 million. Those comps sit under the $30 million to $35 million target Amazon is chasing, which is why the A-list cast has to do work the title alone did in 2024.

If Friday lands near the high end of tracking, the studio can argue that R-rated Hoover is a different product from the weepies. If it lands near Reminders of Him, the $40 million looks heavy for a brand that already proved it can open, and then proved it can shrink.

Why Anne Hathaway Carries the Marketing

Reviewers who dislike the plot still pause on Hathaway. She plays a mute patient in the present and a vivid, nasty presence in flashback, and several notices treat those scenes as the only reason to stay seated. Johnson keeps the temperature low, which fits a character who is supposed to be absorbing someone else’s life. Hartnett plays grief as charm, then as something harder to trust.

We had to make the film as sexy as the book.

Anne Hathaway, producer and star, during promotion

Hathaway also pitched a kiss that is not in Hoover’s novel, a moment in which Lowen’s hunger for Jeremy turns into hunger for Verity. Showalter said the two actors asked what would happen if Johnson started kissing Hartnett and Hartnett became Hathaway. Hoover admitted she was nervous because the scene was new, then called it one of her favorite additions once she saw it cut into the trailer.

That is the commercial logic in miniature. The book’s heat is the product. The movie adds a star who will lean into villainy, a director who already made The Idea of You with Hathaway, and an R rating the earlier Hoover pictures did not have. Critics who wanted a grimy 1990s erotic thriller say Showalter still pulled his punches. Critics who wanted a tight mystery say the third act unravels. Both complaints can be true at once, and neither one tells you whether the people who already own the paperback will pay for the glass of wine on screen.

Readers Still Argue Over the Letter

Hoover self-published Verity on Dec. 7, 2018, as a departure from her romances. Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette imprint, picked it up in 2021 after BookTok turned the title into a dare. The Grand Central edition of the novel is the one most ticket buyers have on a shelf. It later won the British Book Award for Pageturner in 2023.

The story’s engine is a manuscript Lowen finds in the house, written as Verity’s confession, and a last-page letter that tells Jeremy the manuscript was an exercise, not a diary. Readers have spent years picking a camp. Some believe the pages. Some believe the letter. Some think Verity is too good a liar for either document to be safe. That argument is still live in the days before the movie opens, which is more useful to Amazon than a clean critical score.

The book has climbed again as the film’s date got close, returning near the top of Amazon’s fiction lists after more than a hundred weeks in the churn. Hoover is a producer on the movie, a larger credit than she took on the first adaptations. She has said she was not in the room when the director was hired, then became part of the daily work once shooting was real. The plot is about a publisher keeping a brand alive with a ghostwriter. The production is a version of that job, with movie stars finishing a book the public already finished in its head.

Showalter Shot an R-Rated Hoover Picture

Showalter came up in comedy, from Wet Hot American Summer to The Big Sick, and he has been frank that he wanted an erotic thriller in the Hitchcock lane, not a prestige chamber piece. At the London premiere he said he grew up on those movies and called this shoot a dream. He also said he wanted a mainstream film that trusted people to sit with ugly ideas. The finished cut keeps splitting viewers on whether he trusted them enough.

HOW THE MOVIE GOT TO OCT. 2

1. December 7, 2018: Hoover self-publishes Verity.
2. 2021: Grand Central Publishing reissues the book after a BookTok surge.
3. May 2024: Amazon MGM sets the novel for a feature.
4. November 2024: Showalter signs on to direct and Hathaway agrees to play Verity.
5. December 2024: Johnson and Hartnett join as Lowen and Jeremy.
6. February 2025: Shooting starts in New York City with Hathaway and Hartnett; Johnson’s scenes follow in March; production wraps in April 2025.
7. March 2025: The studio dates the film for May 15, 2026, then moves it to Oct. 2.
8. September 24, 2026: World premiere at the Curzon Mayfair in London.

The delay from May to October put the movie in a fall corridor where adult thrillers sometimes hold, and it also put reviews in the public’s hands before the first Friday. A Tokyo International Film Festival gala screening follows later in October. That does not change the math this weekend.

Johnson, speaking in London, said the story is about how hard it is to know what is true and whom to trust. Showalter’s own hope, offered on the same circuit, was simpler. He said he just wants people to like the movie. Amazon’s test is colder. Friday’s receipts will show whether Hoover’s darkest book still moves a crowd that already knows the ending it wants to fight about, or whether a $40 million R-rated bet arrived one hit too late.