Dakota Johnson’s New Thriller Officially Hits No. 1 After Being Removed from 1,700 Theaters

He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema. 

After a month-long run in theaters, a new psychological thriller based on a beloved bestseller has made a smashing debut on the PVOD market. It’s almost as if audiences were waiting for the film to hit home video, because it certainly fell short of box-office expectations. In the last two years, the similarly targeted films It Ends with Us and The Housemaid grossed $350 million and $400 million worldwide, respectively. However, the new movie will likely fall short of the $200 million mark as it winds up its theatrical run.

Like It Ends with Us, which rode a wave of controversy to become a word-of-mouth mega-hit in 2024, the new film is based on a novel by Colleen Hoover. Two less popular books by Hoover inspired the recent romance films Regretting You and Reminders of Him, which made around $90 million each at the worldwide box office. However, the new movie’s source material is vastly more well-known, and so, it was always expected to do better than both Reminders of Him and Regretting You.

As things stand, the new thriller based on Hoover’s bestseller finds itself with a similar global box-office haul as that of The Girl on the Train, which was released in the wake of Gone Girl‘s smash success. Gone Girl grossed around $370 million worldwide, while The Girl on the Train made around $175 million globally a decade ago. The more recent movie Where the Crawdads Sing, which was aimed at a similar audience, made around $150 million in its theatrical run.

But we’re talking about Verity, starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett. The movie is now sitting at $172 million worldwide against a reported budget of $40 million, having gone from more than 3,500 theaters nationwide to around 1,800 theaters in its fifth week. Reviews for the movie were mediocre, and it now holds a 31% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The aggregator website’s consensus reads, “Possessing all the ingredients for a guilty pleasure, Verity leans more towards guilty than pleasurable due to plot twists that are more deflating than intriguing.”

Toni Collette and Kit Harington are shooting a new Miss Marple and 20th
Century has several more Christies in development, so the drawing room is busier than it has been in
decades. Here is which of them you are, and the case for yours being the best.

Order, method, and a quiet confidence that you are the cleverest
person present. Poirot is a retired Belgian police officer who solves murders by sitting
still and thinking, and who is vain enough to make the reveal a performance every single
time.

• You need things to be in their right place and you are not remotely sorry about it.
• David Suchet played him for twenty four years and filmed every single Poirot story
  Christie wrote.
• Kenneth Branagh has made three as director and star, from Orient Express in 2017 to A
  Haunting in Venice.
• Your flaw is that the performance of being right can get in the way of simply being
  helpful.

People tell you things because they cannot imagine you being a
threat. Marple solves murders by comparing everybody to somebody she once knew in St Mary
Mead, which sounds like a joke until you notice it works every time, because human beings
are not as original as they think.

• You are the quietest person in the room and you leave knowing the most.
• Joan Hickson is still the definitive television Marple, and Christie herself wrote to
  her hoping she would one day play the part.
• Toni Collette and Kit Harington are making a new Marple film, announced this summer.
• Your risk is that people only work out how formidable you are once it is far too late.

You have far too many ideas and roughly a fifth of them are
excellent. Ariadne Oliver is a successful crime novelist who is sick of her famous foreign
detective and keeps saying so, which is Christie writing about Christie and getting away
with it completely.

• You think out loud, change your mind twice, and arrive somewhere nobody else would have
  found.
• She was Christie’s own stand-in, right down to being tired of the detective who made her
  rich.
• Tina Fey played her opposite Branagh in A Haunting in Venice and gave her the comic
  timing the part always wanted.
• Your flaw is that fourteen ideas take as long to sort through as they do to have.

You are steady, decent and the reason the difficult genius has
anybody at all. Hastings narrates the early Poirot novels, misses most of the clues, and is
the only character in the books that Poirot is unambiguously fond of, which tells you what
he is really for.

• You are the one who turns up, which sounds small and is not.
• Christie gave him the narrator role so readers would have somebody to be as lost as they
  were.
• Hugh Fraser played him across the ITV series and made him warm rather than slow, which
  earlier versions never managed.
• Your weakness is taking people at their word, which is lovely right up until it is not.

‘Verity’ Dethroned a Massive Hit to Claim the Number-One Spot on PVOD

• Sony Pictures

• Image via Amazon MGM Studios

• Image via Alisha Wetherill / Amazon MGM Studios

• Image via Amazon MGM Studios

• Image via Amazon MGM Studios

Sony Pictures

Image via Amazon MGM Studios

Image via Alisha Wetherill / Amazon MGM Studios

Image via Amazon MGM Studios

Image via Amazon MGM Studios

• Sony Pictures

• Image via Amazon MGM Studios

• Image via Alisha Wetherill / Amazon MGM Studios

• Image via Amazon MGM Studios

• Image via Amazon MGM Studios

Sony Pictures

Image via Amazon MGM Studios

Image via Alisha Wetherill / Amazon MGM Studios

Image via Amazon MGM Studios

Image via Amazon MGM Studios

According to FlixPatrol, Verity claimed the number-one spot on multiple PVOD platforms following its home-video debut, dethroning Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The movie concludes a packed year for Hathaway, who also starred in the blockbusters The Odyssey and The Devil Wears Prada 2. Meanwhile, the target audience of Verity will now look forward to The Housemaid’s Secret, a sequel to the 2025 blockbuster starring Sydney Sweeney.

Verity is now available to rent or buy on PVOD. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.