‘Verity’ Tops the Box Office as Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ Bombs With $8 Million

Moviegoers dug into a thriller this weekend and left Tom Cruise buried. “Verity,” adapted from Colleen Hoover’s novel and starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, opened at No. 1 at the North American box office with an estimated $32.6 million, according to studio estimates released by Rentrak on Sunday. The Amazon MGM Studios release added roughly $30 million overseas for a worldwide debut of about $62.6 million, according to Barron’s.

The weekend’s other big swing went the other way. “Digger,” a disaster-movie satire directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and starring Cruise as an aging oil tycoon, grossed just $8 million in North American theaters and finished fifth for the weekend, behind older releases including “Resident Evil” and “Primetime,” according to USA Today. The film carried a production budget of $125 million according to The Hollywood Reporter, while Variety has estimated the final cost at $160 million to $180 million, a figure Warner Bros. disputes.

For Cruise, the result is a rare stumble. “Digger” is his first film outside the action genre in almost a decade, since 2017’s “American Made,” and appeared to signal a pivot toward dramatic roles after the end of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise. Instead it delivered his worst opening weekend in years: even 2017’s “The Mummy,” which performed poorly enough to end plans for a shared Universal Monsters franchise, still opened to $31 million, according to USA Today. RocketNews, summarizing the same estimates, put the opening below the $12 million to $15 million range Warner Bros. had forecast and called it the actor’s lowest opening weekend since “Lions for Lambs” in 2007.

A win built on a bestselling page-turner

“Verity,” directed by Michael Showalter, extends Hollywood’s run with Hoover’s books, though its $32.6 million start sits below the $50 million opening of “It Ends With Us” and above the debuts of “Reminders of Him” ($18 million) and “Regretting You” ($13.7 million), according to USA Today. The film was made for an estimated $40 million, according to Entertainment Weekly, which means its worldwide opening alone already covers its production budget.

Audiences were lukewarm on both new releases. RocketNews reported that moviegoers gave “Digger” a C+ CinemaScore and “Verity” the same grade, despite sharply different commercial outcomes.

A rough year for Warner Bros.

The flop lands at an awkward moment for Warner Bros. Entertainment Weekly noted that “Digger” joins a string of 2026 disappointments for the studio, including “Practical Magic 2,” “The End of Oak Street” and “The Bride,” and Barron’s reported that the film is the studio’s final release before its acquisition by Paramount closes on Tuesday. RocketNews likewise noted that recent leadership changes at the studio saw film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy depart, with Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein assuming their roles.

The broader business, meanwhile, remains healthy. This weekend’s estimated $99 million in overall domestic box office was down 21% from the last weekend in September but 14.8% higher than the comparable weekend last year, according to Rentrak’s head of marketplace trends, Paul Dergarabedian, as quoted by Barron’s. Domestic ticket sales for the year through Sunday reached an estimated $7.949 billion, 19.4% above the $6.654 billion recorded at the same point in 2025 – leaving the industry roughly $50.8 million short of the $8 billion mark, a milestone Dergarabedian said studios and theaters are expected to reach around Oct. 9.

For one weekend at least, the lesson of the charts was simple: a $40 million thriller outsold a production that cost at least three times as much, and one of the most reliable stars in modern Hollywood discovered that even his name cannot sell a movie audiences do not want to dig into.

Reporting based on coverage by USA Today, Barron’s, Entertainment Weekly and RocketNews.