Verity Is The Box Office Leader Of The Last Three Weekends

Three weekends into October, one film has earned more than any other at the domestic box office, and it opened the month on top. Verity, Amazon MGM Studios’ adaptation of the bestselling thriller, took in $32,031,011 on its opening weekend of October 2–4 — the No. 1 film in the country — and across the three weekends of October 2–18 it grossed a combined $50,083,169, more than any other title in release. Its domestic total through Sunday, October 18 stands at $65,927,001. All figures are Box Office Mojo’s.

The weekend-by-weekend path shows both the size of the opening and the shape of the fall. In its second weekend, October 9–11, Verity dropped to No. 2 with $12,005,559, holding the spot behind the debut of the horror film Other Mommy. In its third weekend, October 16–18, it placed No. 6 with $6,046,599, in a frame led by the opening of Street Fighter. The second-weekend drop of about 63 percent and the third-weekend drop of about 50 percent are steep but typical of a front-loaded thriller: the audience that had read the book arrived first.

The film is directed by Michael Showalter and runs 1 hour 54 minutes, rated R for sexual content, language, bloody images, some nudity and violence. Anne Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, the bestselling author at the center of the story; Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired to complete Crawford’s book series after Crawford is left incapacitated; Josh Hartnett plays Jeremy Crawford, Verity’s husband.

The premise, per the film’s synopsis: working inside the Crawford home, Lowen discovers Verity’s unpublished autobiographical manuscript, which contains disturbing confessions about Verity, her husband Jeremy, and their family. The discovery sets the hired ghostwriter against the household she has moved into — the engine of both the novel’s sales and the film’s opening.

For Amazon MGM, the number that matters most may be the combined one: $50.1 million across three weekends is more than the next film on the combined chart, Other Mommy, earned in the same span by about $14 million, and Verity’s $32.0 million opening remains the biggest single weekend any film has posted in October so far — bigger than Street Fighter’s $30.8 million debut and Other Mommy’s $27.8 million. Whether the film holds through Halloween weekend is the next test: October’s final frame historically belongs to horror, and Verity will be five weekends old by then.

Sources: grosses from Box Office Mojo weekend charts, weekends of October 2–4, October 9–11 and October 16–18, 2026 (with earlier weekends from the same charts); film details and synopses as reported by the distributor and listings. Photo credit on the image above.