Verity Review Roundup: Critics Call It Too Safe, the Popcornmeter Says Otherwise, and Tracking Points to a Solid Hoover Opening
Verity opened in theaters on October 2, and the reaction has split in the way Colleen Hoover adaptations usually do. Critics are mostly unimpressed. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the film stands at a 34% Tomatometer score and a 71% Popcornmeter score, and the critic number has been dropping as more reviews come in. Hoover's readers, and anyone who just wants to watch Anne Hathaway chew scenery, are being kinder.
One caveat before anything else. It is October 3, which means final opening-weekend box office does not exist yet. Every dollar figure in this post is a preview number, a projection or a tracking estimate, and I'll label each one as such. Treat them as a read on expectations, not as results.
The Setup
Michael Showalter directed Verity, reuniting with Hathaway after The Idea of You. Nick Antosca wrote the screenplay, adapting Hoover's novel, according to Rotten Tomatoes' editorial coverage and Screen Rant. Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, the bestselling author at the center of the story. Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett and Ismael Cruz Cordova round out the main cast, per the same outlets.
This is an Amazon MGM release, and it arrives with a different pitch from the other Hoover films. Hoover's earlier screen adaptations leaned on romance and melodrama. Verity is a psychological thriller with a romance wrapped around it, and that shift in genre is behind much of the critical argument.
What the Critics Are Saying
The Rotten Tomatoes editorial consensus is worth reading closely because it is more mixed than the 34% suggests. It calls Verity the strongest Hoover adaptation so far, then spends most of its length on how the film falls short anyway. The complaints it lists: the movie plays it safe where it should embrace camp and eroticism, it is faithful to a fault, Johnson and Hartnett lack chemistry, momentum drops whenever Hathaway is off screen, the ending feels rushed, and the tone is inconsistent.
That is a specific set of failures, and most of them point the same direction. The book is lurid, and critics are saying the film is not lurid enough.
The "Afraid to Get Campy" Problem
Carly Lane of Collider put the central complaint in a single sentence: "Devoted readers may be pleased to find much of Hoover's novel rendered here, but the film seems afraid to get too campy or creepy." That is the faithful-to-a-fault note from the consensus, delivered by someone who clearly understands what the source material is doing.
The tension is real. A thriller about a ghostwriter who finds a manuscript she was never meant to read lives on tone. Play it straight and it can feel silly. Lean into the silliness and you get something closer to a pulp classic. According to the roundup of reviews, many critics feel the movie picked neither.
Hathaway Is the Exception
Hathaway is the performance the roundup keeps coming back to. Lane wrote that "She's clearly having a blast…impeccably walking the tightrope between manipulator and tragic figure." The consensus makes the same point from the other side, noting that momentum drops when Hathaway is off screen.
That is a double-edged compliment. It means the lead performance works, and it also means the leads in the romantic half of the story, Johnson and Hartnett, are not carrying their share. The consensus says they lack chemistry, and in a film built on an escalating attraction, that is hard to paper over.
The Fun-in-a-Crowd Defense
The most useful line for anyone deciding whether to buy a ticket comes from Sophia Ciminello of Awards Watch: "The failed seriousness makes Verity fun to watch with a crowd." That is a backhanded compliment, and it probably explains the gap in the scores better than any statistic. A film that takes itself too seriously can still be entertaining in a packed theater, and that is the experience Popcornmeter voters appear to be rewarding.
Where the Scores Stand, and Where They're Heading
As of October 3, Rotten Tomatoes lists the Tomatometer at 34% and the Popcornmeter at 71%. Neither number is final. Early reports put the Tomatometer in the 43-46% range on roughly 65 reviews, and a search snippet put it at 34% on about 125. In other words, the score fell as the review pool roughly doubled. I would not be surprised to see it move again, though the direction is anyone's guess. I could not find a Metacritic score for the film, so I am not citing one.
Reviews from outlets including Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were reported as negative, while Screen Rant was positive, according to search coverage of the review wave. I have not verified those individual reviews against the source pages, so I am only noting the general pattern. The point is that the split is not neatly drawn between prestige outlets and fan sites, but the lean is clear enough.
A 37-point gap between critics and audiences is large, but it is not unusual for this author's films. Which brings us to the track record.
The Hoover Scorecard
Screen Rant lays out the numbers for the three previous adaptations, and they are a useful frame for where Verity is likely to land:
- It Ends With Us (2024): $351 million worldwide, 55% critics and 87% audience, with a $50 million domestic opening.
- Regretting You (2025): $90.5 million worldwide, 29% critics and 83% audience, with a $13.6 million opening.
- Reminders of Him (2026): $89 million worldwide, 56% critics and 87% audience, with a $17.9 million opening.
Screen Rant notes that all three were profitable despite the critic scores. That is the key piece of context for reading Verity's 34%. Critic scores for this franchise have never been the thing that decides box office, and a 34% would sit between Regretting You and the other two, not below them.
What stands out is that the audience score here, 71%, is lower than any of those three. According to Screen Rant's figures, the previous films all sat at 83% or higher with audiences. If the Popcornmeter holds at 71%, it would mean Verity is the first Hoover adaptation of this run where the core fanbase is only moderately pleased, not just the critics. That is a genuine thing to watch, though early audience scores are volatile and tend to settle as more viewers weigh in.
The Box Office Picture: Previews and Projections
Here is where I have to be careful. According to Koimoi, which is a secondary outlet and whose figures should be checked against the trade reports, Verity earned $4.5 million from Thursday previews in North America. Koimoi says that is the second-best preview number among Hoover films, behind It Ends With Us at $7 million, and ahead of Reminders of Him at $1.9 million and Regretting You at $1 million.
Those preview numbers are encouraging on their face, but preview-to-weekend multipliers vary a lot from film to film, and a fan-driven title can be front-loaded. A big preview does not automatically translate into a big weekend.
For the weekend itself, here is what has been projected:
- Koimoi projects $35-40 million domestic and $50-60 million worldwide.
- A pre-weekend forecast attributed to Boxoffice Pro and Box Office Report put the opening at about $34.9 million from 3,510 theaters. That is search-snippet-level information, so I am hedging it.
- Earlier tracking had the film at $25-35 million.
The direction of travel is upward, from the $25-35 million tracking range to a projection in the high $30 millions. If the Koimoi number holds, Verity would open to roughly double what Reminders of Him did, and it would still land well below the $50 million that It Ends With Us opened to. None of this is confirmed. I would wait for the Sunday and Monday trade numbers before drawing conclusions.
I also have no verified Friday figure to share, so there is no way yet to check whether those previews are converting into a full opening day.
The Competition
According to Koimoi, Verity is expected to win the weekend over Digger, which reportedly took about $1.2 million in Thursday previews. Search-level reports put Resident Evil second at roughly $13.4 million and Digger third at about $11.0 million, though I would treat those two as soft estimates. Either way, the gap between first place and the field is wide in these projections.
Why This Opening Matters More Than Usual
Screen Rant frames Verity as the end of an era. That is the outlet's framing, not a confirmed studio statement. Its argument is that this is the last of the first wave of four Hoover adaptations, and that studios have not optioned more of her books. According to Screen Rant, a hit could greenlight Hopeless, All Your Perfects and Ugly Love, while a miss would make studios hesitant.
That puts more weight on the weekend than the film's reviews would suggest. A $35-40 million opening, if it arrives, would be a strong argument that the market for these films is intact even with a thriller instead of a straight romance. A figure at the bottom of the earlier tracking range would be easier to read as the audience cooling.
The second-weekend drop will tell us more than the opening. A film that people go to see because they love the book tends to front-load. A film people recommend to friends because it is fun in a crowd, which is what Ciminello's review describes, can hold better. The 71% Popcornmeter score suggests the front-loading scenario is the more likely one, but that is an inference from a number that is still moving.
The Bottom Line
Verity appears to be a movie that is better than the worst Hoover adaptations and still falls short of what its premise promised. The critics who like it, like Hathaway. The ones who do not, wanted it to commit to camp. The audience, for now, is more forgiving, though less so than for the previous three films.
The box office projections look healthy, with the caveat that none of them are actuals. If the weekend comes in near $35-40 million, studios will have a hard time ignoring it. If it lands closer to the lower tracking range and the Popcornmeter keeps sliding, Screen Rant's "end of an era" framing may turn out to be right for reasons nobody wanted.
Opening-weekend actuals land in the Sunday and Monday trade reports. The real test is the second weekend, and whether a solid result revives studio interest in Hopeless, All Your Perfects and Ugly Love.