Anne Hathaway's Verity Opened at No. 1. Tom Cruise's Digger Opened at $8 Million. Hollywood Is Fine
The same weekend, a thriller from a Colleen Hoover novel made $32.6 million while Tom Cruise's $160 million black comedy dug itself a hole. Somebody in an office is very quiet today.
By the Heckle Desk · · 1 min read
Last weekend at the movies, two things happened at once, the way two things happen at once at a wedding: one person gives a beautiful toast, and the other person falls into the cake.
The toast was Verity, a thriller adapted from a Colleen Hoover novel, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. It opened at number one with about $32.6 million in the United States and another $30 million overseas. The cake was Digger, a black comedy starring Tom Cruise, which opened to about $8 million here and $20 million abroad, against a reported budget of around $160 million. Critics gave it a 51 percent. Audiences gave it a C-plus, which in Hollywood is what you call a failing grade that went to private school.
Now, I like Tom Cruise. Everybody likes Tom Cruise, or at least everybody respects him, the way you respect a man who will jump off anything. But a box office analyst put it best: a black comedy is supposed to be a small film, and this was not a small film. You can't make a quiet little joke for $160 million. That's not a joke anymore. That's a war.
And Hathaway, meanwhile, keeps quietly doing the thing movie stars used to do, which is making movies people actually go to see on a Friday night. No capes. No running up the side of a building. Just a dark story, a famous book and two actresses who know what they're doing.
There's a lesson here for Hollywood, and it's an old one. The audience will follow a star almost anywhere, but it won't follow a star into a $160 million hole just because he's holding the shovel.