Verity Opens at No. 1 With a $15.1 Million Friday as Digger Heads for Tom Cruise's Lowest Debut in 19 Years

The Colleen Hoover adaptation is on course for about $33 million over the weekend against a $40 million budget, while the reported $160 million Digger is tracking toward $8 million. Audiences gave both films a C+.

The weekend's two new wide releases opened on the same day with similar reviews and ended Friday almost $12 million apart. Variety reports that Verity, Amazon MGM Studios' adaptation of Colleen Hoover's thriller, took first place with $15.1 million from 3,510 theaters in the U.S. and Canada on Friday, October 2. Digger, the Warner Bros. satire that Alejandro G. Iñárritu directed with Tom Cruise in the lead, made $3.4 million from 3,321 theaters. Thursday-night previews, which are normally counted in the opening-day figure, had already pointed this way: MovieWeb put them at $3.4 million for Verity and $1.2 million for Digger.

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Verity details →YouTube ↗

Saturday's estimates turn that gap into a weekend. Deadline has Verity at No. 1 with about $33 million, in line with the $30 million to $35 million the trade press had projected, and Digger at about $8 million. That is below even the reduced $12 million to $15 million forecast Digger carried into the weekend, and Deadline calls it Cruise's lowest opening in 19 years. Weekend totals are still estimates until final numbers arrive on Monday.

The budgets are what make these two results so different. Verity cost a reported $40 million, so an opening in the low thirties recovers most of the production budget in three days, before overseas ticket sales. Digger's production cost is reported at $160 million, with other outlets giving figures between $125 million and $180 million. An $8 million start against a number like that is a write-off-sized problem for a studio, however the rest of the run goes.

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Reviews do not explain the difference. Critics disliked Verity more than Digger: it sits at 34% on Rotten Tomatoes, against scores in the low fifties for Iñárritu's film. What Verity has is a built-in audience. Hoover's readers have turned out for each of her adaptations: It Ends With Us opened to $50 million, Reminders of Him to $17.9 million and Regretting You to $13.6 million, according to MovieWeb. Verity will be the second-biggest of the four. Digger is an original, R-rated political satire with no book or franchise behind it, and its first weekend rested on Cruise's name and on reviews that turned out to be mixed.

There is a warning inside Verity's win. Opening-night audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a C+, the same grade they gave Digger. For Hoover's films that is a clear step down: It Ends With Us earned an A-, and Reminders of Him and Regretting You each got a B. A C+ usually points to a steep second-weekend drop, because it means a share of the people who rushed out on Friday will not be recommending the film on Monday. For Verity that matters less than it would for most releases, since so much of its audience arrives in the first three days anyway.

For Digger the grade removes the one path it had left. A film that opens small can still recover if the people who see it tell their friends to go, and a C+ says that is not happening. It is a rough outcome for a project many critics singled out for its ambition and for Cruise's performance, and it will be read in Hollywood as evidence about what audiences will and will not show up for: an expensive original satire lost, by a factor of four, to a mid-budget adaptation of a novel millions of people had already read.

If you are choosing between them this week, the box office is not a guide to which is better. Our reviews put Digger at a FilmRated Score of 61 and Verity at 46, and both come down to a lead performance that is stronger than the film around it. We will update this story with the final weekend figures when the studios report them.

Original coverage: Verity opens at No. 1; Digger heads for an $8 million debut