Colleen Hoover’s Verity tops Australian box office and grosses $163m worldwide, Sydney Morning Herald says

Sydney Morning Herald reports that Verity, the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel, opened strongly in Australia, topping the national box office after its October 1 release.

The psychological thriller, directed for the screen from Hoover’s work, stars Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett and Dakota Johnson and has earned more than $163 million worldwide against a production budget of $57.3 million, the newspaper says.

Critics have been mostly critical, but the box-office tally and Hoover’s large readership have translated into commercial success for the movie. Hoover’s personal publishing history is central to the Herald’s account of why her books now translate into box-office draws.

The newspaper traces her start to self-publishing on Amazon, written on her mother’s laptop in a Texas trailer, and notes that by 2022 her titles outsold the Bible by more than 3 million copies in the United States.

That year she held six of the top 10 slots on The New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list, a performance the Herald presents as evidence of a strong, built-in audience for screen adaptations.

The Herald also records wider commercial markers of Hoover’s popularity: she has sold over 35 million books worldwide, and one of her recent novels, It Starts With Us, set a Simon & Schuster record for the most pre-orders in the publisher’s 100-year history.

Those publishing milestones are used in the Herald’s piece to explain why studios have invested in multiple Hoover adaptations despite mixed critical notices.

According to the Herald, the film’s $163 million global gross sits comfortably above its $57.3 million production budget, a margin the article implies makes Verity commercially viable even where reviews have been ‘middling to scathing.’ The Herald quotes a commentator saying that strong parasocial relationships between authors and readers are valuable in the current attention economy, a point the paper uses to link Hoover’s readership to the film’s box-office performance.

Several other outlets have reported on Verity and Hoover’s Hollywood status in headline form, underscoring the breadth of coverage: The Age ran a piece on how Hoover became a bankable name in Hollywood, Yahoo published an item about the film’s ending, and comicbasics.com noted the movie’s release.

The Herald’s account remains the only full-text source in this briefing and supplies the detailed figures and publishing history cited above.

What is confirmed by the Herald’s reporting is the film’s commercial returns and Hoover’s outsized book sales; what is not provided in the article are full box-office breakdowns by market, detailed studio accounting, or independent verification of the global gross beyond the figures the newspaper reports.