Digger was loud. It just wasn't liked.
Tom Cruise's new film drew nearly twice the attention of Verity, and the talk around it was some of the most negative we track. Loud plus negative is what a flop looks like.
Two movies opened last Friday. One starred Tom Cruise and was directed by a two-time Oscar winner. The other was adapted from a Colleen Hoover novel.
Verity won the weekend with $32.6 million. Digger opened to $8 million.
If you only looked at attention, you would have guessed the opposite.
Loud
From Friday through Tuesday, Digger drew nearly twice as much attention as Verity. It was ahead every single day of opening week, too. By that measure alone, Digger was the bigger movie.
Not liked
Then look at what people were saying. Digger got about two and a half times as much press as Verity over the same stretch, and it was far more negative. The headlines told the story before the box office did: a split with critics, Cruise firing back at them, "poised for a disastrous opening," and then the word everyone was waiting to use. Bombed.
On our sentiment scale, Digger sits near the bottom tenth of all the films we track.
Verity's reviews weren't kind either. Critics rarely are with a Hoover adaptation, and its score is low too. But the tone was much milder, and her readers didn't need the critics' permission.
Loud and liked is a hit. Loud and disliked is a car crash. People slow down for both.
The movie sold the book
While everyone was watching Digger, the Verity novel jumped to almost five times its normal attention the week the movie opened. Hoover's newest book, Woman Down, rose with it. That's what a story people already own looks like. The audience didn't need convincing. It needed a date.
Our call for weekend two
Here's where sentiment earns its keep. Digger's attention held up into the week and even rose on Monday. On attention alone, our model reads that as staying power and says Digger holds up better than Verity.
We don't believe it. Attention this loud and this negative is people reading about the flop, not people planning to see it. So we're overruling the model:
- Digger falls about 65% or more, to under $3 million.
- Verity falls about 55%, to roughly $14 to $15 million. Its fans came all at once, so a big drop is normal.
- Verity wins by about five to one.
To be clear about what this is: our sentiment history is new, and we don't have enough past films yet to test this combination the way we tested attention. It's a judgment call, made in public.
We'll score it here on Monday, right or wrong.
How we measured: daily attention for each film, indexed to Verity's opening day, from Monday, September 28 through Tuesday, October 6. Press volume and tone cover the five days before opening through the following Tuesday. Box office figures are reported Friday-to-Sunday weekend estimates. The attention-only model was built on second-weekend results for 40 wide releases in 2026.