Digger And Verity: Theatrical Releases, No Streaming Date Yet

Digger And Verity Open Theatrical-Only, No Safety-Net Endings

Warner Bros is betting audiences will argue over Tom Cruise's dystopian thriller while Dakota Johnson's Colleen Hoover adaptation skips streaming entirely for now.

By Overseas1 hour ago2 min read

Current hype level60

Warner Bros is doing something unusual with Digger. Instead of hiding the fact that critics can't agree on it, the studio has built a marketing push around exactly that disagreement, daring audiences to walk in and settle the argument themselves.

Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a man racing to undo a disaster he caused, in a dystopian flooded city. The ensemble around him is stacked: Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde and Emma D'Arcy all get screen time, and the credits list them in the order they appear rather than by the usual billing hierarchy. There's no fresh footage tucked after the names roll, just more shots of the wrecked city laid under the credits. Nobody needs to wait around for a tease of a sequel here. Warner Bros hasn't said when Digger lands on HBO Max, though given the studio's own streaming pipeline, it almost certainly will eventually.

Across town, a different kind of bet is playing out. Verity, adapted from Colleen Hoover's novel, opened in theatres only on October 2, with no streaming date attached. Dakota Johnson leads as Lowen Ashleigh, a writer hired to finish the work of a bestselling author, played by Anne Hathaway, after a mysterious accident leaves her unable to write. Josh Hartnett plays the author's husband. Moving into the family home to complete the manuscript, Lowen stumbles on an unpublished draft that spills disturbing secrets about the household she's just joined.

The reviews haven't been kind. Verity sits at 41% on Rotten Tomatoes, and that's with the film barely a day old. There's no post-credits scene to stick around for either, Just Jared has confirmed, so anyone racing for the exit the second the lights come up isn't missing a thing. Runtime clocks in at just under two hours, and it's rated R.

What both films share is a kind of theatrical stubbornness. Neither one is offering a streaming cushion if the opening weekend stumbles, and neither is dangling a mid-credits hook to keep audiences talking online. Digger is leaning into controversy as a selling point, while Verity is leaning on Hoover's built-in readership to carry it past shaky notices.

Online chatter has been more baffled than hostile toward Digger, with some calling the concept oddly artificial rather than bold. Whether that translates into ticket sales is the only number that matters now. Both films are already playing, so the argument over whether either one works stops being a marketing exercise by the weekend and becomes a box office report.