Colleen Hoover's 'Verity' Opens to $145 Million and a Divided Press

Colleen Hoover's fiction keeps arriving in theaters whether critics are ready or not. 'Verity,' directed by Michael Showalter and adapted by Nick Antosca, opened wide on October 2 and has since grossed $145.3 million worldwide, according to the film's Wikipedia entry. That's a meaningful number for an R-rated erotic thriller in a landscape where studios keep insisting adult genre films don't sell. Hoover's BookTok army, apparently, disagrees.

The premise is pure gothic fun on paper. Lowen Ashleigh, a broke novelist played by Dakota Johnson, gets hired to ghostwrite for the incapacitated Verity Crawford, a wildly successful thriller author played by Hathaway, while moving into the Crawford home and falling for Verity's grieving husband, Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett. She finds a manuscript. The manuscript is extremely alarming. Everything escalates from there.

The critical split is almost as interesting as the film itself. On the generous end, reviewers at Screen Rant called it "the best Colleen Hoover adaptation to date" and wrote that Johnson has "never seemed more comfortable and confident in front of the camera." Fresh Fiction called it "exactly my kind of stupid, silly smut," which is honestly a more useful piece of criticism than it sounds. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, audiences sided firmly with the fans, emphasizing that Hathaway carries the movie on her back.

Hathaway does carry it. That's the one thing almost no one disputes. The critics who liked the film and the critics who didn't both kept circling back to her. Variety said Showalter "shows no feel whatsoever for the erotic thriller genre," while Slash Film gave the film a 2 out of 10 and called it barely a movie at all. But even Slash Film noted that Hathaway "stays excellent" throughout. A lesser actress playing Verity Crawford could have sunk this thing in the first act.

The problem, and most serious critics agree on this, is that the film doesn't commit. Collider put it cleanly: the movie "isn't nearly as creepy, campy, or sexy as it could have, and should have, been." The AV Club gave it a C+ and said it "lopes around unevenly instead of building to a fever pitch." The Chicago Reader, reviewing it in the past week, wished Showalter had leaned harder toward something like 'A Simple Favor' instead of trying to make Hitchcock with less tension and more product placement. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus lands on a line worth quoting: "leans more towards guilty than pleasurable due to plot twists that are more deflating than intriguing."

That assessment feels right to me. Showalter's instinct in 'The Big Sick' was to underplay, to stay in register, to trust the quiet. That's the opposite of what Hoover's pulpiest material demands. 'Verity' the novel works because Hoover leans into the hysteria without winking at you. The film keeps winking.

None of that hurt the opening weekend. And none of it will stop the Hoover pipeline. As Slash Film pointed out, the Hoover adaptation machine shows no signs of slowing, with 'It Ends With Us' already having come and gone through the discourse machine before this one. The question isn't whether the audience for these films exists. It obviously does. The question is whether a studio will eventually hire a director who actually wants to make one of them deeply, committedly weird rather than prestige-adjacent and safe.

Hathaway, who also produced 'Verity,' clearly sees the potential in this material. She's right. Someone should let her make the weird version.

Sources cited:
- Wikipedia (Verity film) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_(film))
- Variety (https://variety.com/2026/film/news/verity-review-dakota-johnson-anne-hathaway-1236893315/)
- Slash Film (https://www.slashfilm.com/2273049/verity-review-anne-hathaway-colleen-hoover-movie/)
- Screen Rant (https://screenrant.com/verity-movie-review/)
- Collider (https://collider.com/verity-movie-review-anne-hathaway-dakota-johnson-josh-hartnett/)
- AV Club (https://www.avclub.com/verity-review-colleen-hoover-anne-hathaway-dakota-johnson)
- Rotten Tomatoes (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/verity)
- Fresh Fiction (https://freshfiction.tv/verity-review-anne-hathaway-dakota-johnson-are-a-scream-in-campy-colleen-hoover-adaptation/)
- Chicago Reader (via Rotten Tomatoes) (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/verity)