Verity movie release date and cast: Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett lead the first Colleen Hoover film that's an R-rated thriller, not a romance
BookTok's favorite author is back on screen — except this time the marriage at the center of the story comes with a locked office and a manuscript nobody was supposed to read.
The second Colleen Hoover movie ever made arrives in theaters October 2, and it is aggressively not the first one. Where It Ends With Us was a PG-13 romance that grossed over $350 million worldwide (and then spent two years generating legal filings), Verity is an R-rated psychological thriller from Amazon MGM — adapted from the 2018 novel Hoover's readers know as the one you don't recommend to your mother.
The setup: struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is hired by Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) to finish the bestselling book series of his wife Verity (Anne Hathaway), left incapacitated after a mysterious accident. Lowen moves into their house, finds an unpublished autobiography that reads like a confession, and starts wondering — along with the audience — whether Verity is as incapacitated as advertised.
The vitals
- Director: Michael Showalter, reuniting with Hathaway after The Idea of You — she also produces
- Script: Nick Antosca (Channel Zero, The Act), after passes by Hilary Seitz and Angela LaManna
- Budget and shape: $40 million, 117 minutes), shot in New York in early 2025, moved from a May date to the awards-adjacent fall corridor
- The references: Showalter has name-checked Hitchcock's Rebecca and Brian De Palma, calling his three leads a "super group"
The cast is having more fun than the characters
For a movie about gaslighting and possible child endangerment, the press tour has been suspiciously giggly. Hathaway on playing the title menace:
"There's just something about knowing that you're supposed to be scary that makes you giggle."
Johnson, meanwhile, described her attraction to Lowen with trademark deadpan:
"It just seemed really fun to play somebody who's deeply unwell."
And Hartnett — who is having the strangest great year of any actor alive, with this landing six days before his Netflix sea-monster series Below — framed Jeremy as another entry in his play-against-myself project. Verity opens exclusively in theaters October 2 through Amazon MGM, with Sony handling international; the Prime Video streaming date comes later.
Previously we wrote: Josh Duhamel's Speak movie cast: he leads a horror thriller that's basically The Shining with a ventriloquist dummy
