Colleen Hoover movies have already settled into a recognizable lane. It Ends With Us, Regretting You, and Reminders of Him all revolve around relationships under pressure, with romance, grief, betrayal, and emotional fallout driving the story. It Ends With Us proved just how big that audience could be, earning roughly $351 million worldwide and turning Hoover into a much more known name at the box office.

Verity is the first adaptation that really pushes against that image. It still has a relationship at its center, but the movie is being sold as an R-rated psychological thriller, with suspicion, manipulation, and the possibility that someone inside the Crawford house is dangerously taking over the story. That immediately makes it a very different kind of Hoover adaptation.

That is what makes Verity such a clear break from the formula that worked for It Ends With Us. Hoover’s previous adaptations have all leaned on relationships, heartbreak, and emotional drama, but Verity is asking audiences to show up for suspicion, violence, and psychological tension instead. For the first time, a Colleen Hoover adaptation is testing whether her name can sell the movie even when the genre looks completely different.

Verity Is Nothing Like The Colleen Hoover Movies We’ve Had So Far

So far, a Colleen Hoover movie has meant getting pulled into someone’s relationship problems. It Ends With Us focuses on Lily trying to break a cycle of abuse. Regretting You deals with grief, betrayal, and a fractured mother-daughter relationship. Reminders of Him follows a woman trying to rebuild her life and reconnect with the child she lost. Different stories, but all three ask the audience to care most about love, family, forgiveness, and whether damaged relationships can be repaired.

Lowen enters the Crawford house thinking she is there to finish another writer’s book series. Instead, she finds an unfinished manuscript that appears to confess to things no one in that family wants exposed. Suddenly, the job is not just about writing. It is about figuring out whether Verity is telling the truth on the page, whether Jeremy knows more than he admits, and whether Lowen is walking deeper into a situation she does not fully understand.

Her growing attraction to Jeremy only complicates that. The closer Lowen gets to him, the harder it becomes to separate what she wants to believe from what the manuscript seems to be telling her. Romance is still part of the story, but here it makes Lowen less reliable, not more secure.

That leaves Verity playing a very different game from Hoover’s earlier movies. Lowen is piecing together a story while becoming personally involved with the people at the center of it, so every new revelation comes with a reason to question how she is interpreting it. The audience is left doing the same thing, constantly reassessing Verity, Jeremy, and Lowen as the Crawford family’s story becomes harder to untangle.

Verity Could Show How Much Colleen Hoover’s Name Actually Means At The Box Office

It Ends With Us was a huge hit, but it is also a difficult movie to use as the baseline for every Colleen Hoover adaptation. Its release became a major cultural event, with Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s apparent rift attracting intense attention during the press tour before later exploding into a highly public legal dispute. Regretting You and Reminders of Him both finished around the $90 million mark, which leaves a much bigger question about how much of that $351 million run can actually be replicated by another Hoover movie (via HighOnFilms).

The tricky part is that Verity is not exactly walking into theaters on Hoover’s name alone. Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett give it a much bigger star hook than the last two adaptations, and the book already has a strong following of its own. So if the movie breaks out, the interesting question will not just be whether Hoover can sell a thriller. It will be how much of that audience showed up for her, how much came for the cast, and how much was already waiting for Verity specifically.

If Verity brings another large box office success, the most interesting consequence may be what gets adapted next. Studios would have a reason to look beyond Hoover’s relationship-heavy books and treat her name as something that can carry very different kinds of stories. If it does not, It Ends With Us starts to look less like the beginning of a dependable franchise model and more like a very specific lightning-in-a-bottle success from Colleen Hoover.

Release Date

October 2, 2026

Runtime

117 minutes

Director

Michael Showalter

Writers

Nick Antosca, Colleen Hoover

Producers

Alex Hedlund, Anne Hathaway, Colleen Hoover, Jordana Mollick, Michael Showalter, Nick Antosca, Stacey Sher