Colleen Hoover’s thriller pulled in $4.5 million Thursday night, nearly four times Digger’s start.
The Digger box office run began Thursday night with $1.2 million from previews in North America, a modest start for Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s $125 million climate satire. Warner Bros. is projecting an opening weekend of $12 million to $15 million from more than 3,300 theaters.
The weekend belongs to Verity. Amazon MGM Studios‘ adaptation of Colleen Hoover‘s bestselling thriller earned $4.5 million from Thursday previews and is tracking toward a $27 million to $30 million debut from 3,510 locations. That would be a strong return on a $40 million production budget.
Digger was always going to be a harder sell. Cruise plays a bombastic oil tycoon who sets off a global catastrophe, a sharp turn away from the action franchises that have defined his last decade and a return to the filmmaker-driven swings of Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July and Magnolia. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman and Sandra Huller co-star. Warner Bros. is positioning the film as an awards contender and is counting on word of mouth to carry it beyond a soft start.
Critics are no help in settling the debate. The Digger reviews have split almost exactly down the middle, and the film sits at 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. We are firmly on the positive side. In our review of Digger, we called it “the most audacious studio movie of the year and the wildest performance of Cruise’s career.”
The film is also opening at a moment of upheaval for its studio. Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are exiting ahead of the merger with Paramount, which is expected to close Tuesday, October 6. Paramount’s Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein are expected to run film for both studios under the newly named Skydance, a change we had some thoughts about.
De Luca and Abdy are leaving after one of the best runs in recent studio history. One Battle After Another and Sinners both won Oscars in March. This year has been rockier, with The Bride! and Supergirl falling short of expectations, and Digger now becomes the last major release of their tenure.
Verity, meanwhile, is on track to become one of the bigger Hoover adaptations. Its $4.5 million in previews ranks second among films based on her books, behind the $7 million earned by Sony’s It Ends With Us in 2024 on its way to a $50 million opening. Universal’s Reminders of Him, released in March, took in $1.9 million in previews before opening to $17.9 million.
The film has its own critical challenge, with a 39 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. We were kinder, calling it a twisty, trashy good time with Anne Hathaway as its secret weapon. Hoover’s readers, as usual, do not seem to be waiting for the critics.
Michael Showalter directs Verity from a screenplay by Nick Antosca. Dakota Johnson stars as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired to ghostwrite for bestselling author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), with Josh Hartnett as Verity’s husband, Jeremy.
