Hollywood loves a big bet. This weekend, however, the smaller gamble delivered the bigger payoff. Amazon MGM’s Verity, directed by Michael Showalter and starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, opened to approximately $32.6 million in North America and $62.6 million worldwide, taking the No. 1 spot. Across town, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, led by Tom Cruise, managed only about $8 million domestically and $20 million worldwide.
The contrast becomes even sharper when the budgets are placed side by side. Verity reportedly cost about $40 million, while Digger was initially approved at $125 million and was later reported by Variety sources to have climbed to between $160 million and $180 million, figures Warner Bros. disputes. The difference in production costs makes the weekend results more significant than a simple comparison of opening grosses.
The numbers make this look like a straightforward box-office upset, but the result is more interesting than that. Verity did not merely beat a Tom Cruise movie; its opening highlighted how differently Hollywood can price a familiar star vehicle and a female-driven genre film. A thriller costing roughly $40 million needed only a strong opening to put itself in a much healthier position. A movie carrying a reported $160 million-plus price tag needed a dramatically larger audience from the start.
According to TheWrap, industry estimates suggested that Digger would have needed an opening close to $40 million to justify a budget of that scale. Its approximately $8 million domestic opening was therefore far below the level required to support the economics of such a large production. The comparison with Verity demonstrates how the financial expectations surrounding a film can change dramatically depending on its production cost, even when both movies are being positioned as major theatrical releases.
That is where the older Hollywood assumption about female-led movies starts to look increasingly shaky. A landmark Creative Artists Agency and shift7 study examined 350 top-grossing films released between 2014 and 2017. The result was striking: films with women listed as leads produced higher average worldwide box-office grosses than male-led films at every budget level, from movies costing under $10 million to those costing more than $100 million.
Of the 350 films examined in the study, 105 were classified as female-led and 245 as male-led. The findings challenged the idea that films centered on women necessarily have a smaller commercial ceiling, particularly when compared with movies built around male stars.
The same research produced another notable result. Among the 319 films for which Bechdel Test data was available, movies that passed the test earned more at every budget level than those that failed. The test itself is hardly a demanding one: it asks whether at least two named female characters speak to each other about something other than a man.
Yet every film that crossed $1 billion worldwide during the study period passed the test. Eleven films reached that mark between 2014 and 2017, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, Beauty and the Beast and Finding Dory. While the Bechdel Test is not itself a measure of box-office potential, the findings provide another data point in the broader argument that audiences can respond strongly to stories in which women have meaningful roles and relationships beyond their connections to male characters.
The more recent numbers make that argument harder to dismiss. A 2026 study examining nearly 200,000 films released between 1994 and 2023 found that films with a woman writer but no woman director recorded a median profit 34% higher than films made entirely by men. Films with both a woman writer and woman director recorded a 25% higher median return on investment.
At the very top end of production budgets, the difference becomes even more striking. In the top 10% budget tier, films written by women had median profits about £101 million higher than films made entirely by men. These findings add another layer to the discussion surrounding Verity, particularly because its opening demonstrates that a female-led thriller can attract a substantial theatrical audience without requiring the scale of investment associated with a major studio tentpole.
And Verity offers a useful twist to the audience argument. Its opening crowd was 78% female, but Amazon’s international teams reported that the film was also attracting male viewers and people who had never read Colleen Hoover’s novel.
That matters because it suggests the movie was not surviving solely on BookTok loyalty or on the existing readership of the source material. Instead, it was selling a basic theatrical promise: give audiences a gripping mystery, recognizable stars and enough unanswered questions to make them want to know what happens next.
The distinction is important because the commercial performance of a film cannot be explained by its target demographic alone. Verity may have opened with a predominantly female audience, but its ability to attract male viewers and people unfamiliar with the novel suggests that the theatrical proposition extended beyond its core readership.
At the same time, Digger demonstrates the limits of relying on scale and star power as guarantees of commercial success. Tom Cruise remains one of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars, while the film carried the name of Alejandro González Iñárritu and was reportedly backed by a production budget many times larger than that of Verity. Yet those factors did not translate into an opening remotely close to the level needed for a production of that cost.
Verity’s success is therefore more than a surprising box-office result. It shows that audiences can turn a relatively modestly priced thriller into a major theatrical event when the story gives them a reason to care. Digger had the stars, scale and enormous investment, but those elements did not guarantee an audience.
The contrast does not mean big-budget films are losing their appeal, nor does one weekend establish a permanent shift in audience behavior. It does, however, demonstrate that the size of a movie’s budget does not always determine the size of its audience. For Hollywood, that may be the most revealing takeaway from Verity’s opening weekend: a carefully positioned, female-led genre film can deliver substantial theatrical returns without carrying the enormous financial expectations attached to a much larger production.