Verity Opens $32.6M as Anne Hathaway Debates Its Ending

Verity Opens To $32.6 Million While Its Own Cast Disagrees On The Ending

Anne Hathaway says she believes Verity's letter over her manuscript, and both author Colleen Hoover and director Michael Showalter admit they still can't settle on what actually happened.

By The Long Shot1 hour ago2 min read

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Verity made $32.6 million from 3,510 North American screens this weekend, enough to top the domestic chart against a $40 million budget. That's the kind of opening a mid-budget adult thriller rarely gets anymore, and it arrives with a bonus the studio couldn't have planned: nobody involved in making the film can agree on how it ends.

The Colleen Hoover adaptation follows Lowen Ashleigh, a writer played by Dakota Johnson, who's brought in to finish the book series of incapacitated author Verity Crawford, played by Anne Hathaway. Lowen finds a manuscript in the Crawford house that reads like a confession. Then, near the end, a letter surfaces that tells a different story. The film never tells you which one is real. Neither, it turns out, does anyone who worked on it.

Hathaway told The Hollywood Reporter she's team letter, not team manuscript, and she's got a theory for why. "She's a terrified woman being very, very careful," Hathaway said of Verity, pushing back on the reading that the letter was just cover. Her bigger argument is literary: Lowen, in the book, calls Verity's manuscript genuinely good writing even while finding its subject matter bleak. If Verity were really the villain the manuscript paints her as, Hathaway reasons, wouldn't a writer that skilled have produced something cleaner, more self-serving? She's also not buying Lowen's account at face value. "I don't trust Lowen. I don't think Lowen's well," Hathaway said, adding she doesn't trust Josh Hartnett's Jeremy either, calling him quick to swing from calm to furious.

Hoover, who wrote the novel the film is based on, says the adaptation actually moved her off her own long-held read. Writing the book from Lowen's point of view, she said she stayed as confused as her narrator for years. Watching the film changed that. "I had to read it again for the first time after watching the film, and I think the film influenced me," Hoover told THR, adding she's landed on a new interpretation but still isn't certain.

Director Michael Showalter isn't picking a side at all. He says he let Hathaway, Johnson and Hartnett each play the scene from their own belief about what's true, rather than forcing a single version onto the set. "I'm agnostic," is how he put it.

That ambiguity looks less like an oversight than a marketing asset right now. A domestic opening past the production budget, on a story where the writer, director and lead actor all read the ending differently, gives Verity something rarer than a twist: a reason for audiences to keep arguing about it well past opening weekend. Whether that argument sustains the film through a second and third weekend, with awards season chatter still months off, is the number Sony will be watching next.