Verity Beats Tom Cruise as October Movies Crowd Theaters

Colleen Hoover’s Verity took in $4.5 million from Thursday previews, nearly four times the $1.2 million Tom Cruise’s Digger managed on the same night. Both films opened wide on October 2, and the Hoover thriller is pacing toward a $32 million weekend while Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s satire sits near $10 million.

October was supposed to prove studios still bankroll star-driven movies for grown-ups. The first night of the month already named a different winner.

A $4.5 Million Preview Already Picked a Winner

Amazon MGM put Verity, Michael Showalter’s R-rated take on Hoover’s psychodrama, into 3,510 theaters. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a writer hired to finish a series after its author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), is hurt in an accident. Josh Hartnett co-stars as the husband. Nick Antosca wrote the script. The production cost $40 million, and Friday receipts reached $14.5 million including those previews.

Warner Bros. sent Digger, Iñárritu’s apocalyptic black comedy, into 3,321 theaters and IMAX the same day. Cruise plays oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, a billionaire trying to fix an ecological disaster he helped start. The film carries a $125 million production budget, more than triple Verity’s, and Legendary Pictures, M. Productions, and Cruise’s TC Productions share the credits. Friday tracking still had it near $10 million for the three-day weekend.

THE OPENING WEEKEND SPLIT

Hoover’s theatrical line already had a template. It Ends With Us opened to $50 million on the way to $350 million worldwide, and Verity is the fourth of her novels to reach a wide screen. Mixed notices have not slowed that audience before, and they are not slowing it here. Hathaway and Johnson are selling a glossy literary thriller. Cruise, after a decade of Ethan Hunt and Maverick, is asking for a Saturday night with an R-rated climate farce.

The reviews describe two different movies, which is a rotten way to fill IMAX. One camp walked out talking about a fearless star turn. The other heard a loud lecture. That kind of split does not move groups at 7 p.m.

What VistaVision Costs When Nobody Shows Up

Iñárritu shot the entire picture in VistaVision with Emmanuel Lubezki, who last did a theatrical feature four years earlier on Bardo. The director had wanted the 1954 Paramount format then and could not afford the logistics. At Pinewood, with studio money behind him, he took the shot.

Now that I was in Pinewood Studios with a good budget, I thought that it was my last opportunity to do a film in VistaVision. It brings the sense that you are working with something precious. A material, not something in the cloud, a chip in a computer. There’s something tactile. There’s something that is real, that sounds. There’s a presence.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu, director, in an interview

The film runs 128 minutes and is rated R for pervasive language. John Goodman plays the president of the United States. Riz Ahmed is the scientist Ganesh. Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde, and Emma D’Arcy fill out the company. Iñárritu wrote it with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman, the Birdman partnership plus a fourth voice, and Cruise produced.

Critics who like it talk about Lubezki’s tableaus and a star going broad, ugly, and comic. Critics who do not call it smug, strained, and pleased with itself. Chase Hutchinson wrote that Iñárritu and Cruise had made “a hate letter to life, cinema, art, and its own audience.” Manohla Dargis labeled it a lumbering white elephant. The same weekend, other viewers insisted Cruise had given the performance of his career. Warner Bros. is moving through a Paramount ownership change while this one plays, which is a cold week to learn that VistaVision does not put bodies in seats by itself.

Sorkin Treats Facebook as a Companion Piece

Seven days after that split, Sony opens The Social Reckoning on October 9. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed this one himself, sixteen years after The Social Network. Mikey Madison, in her first role since winning the Oscar for Anora, plays Facebook engineer Frances Haugen. Jeremy Allen White is Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz. Jeremy Strong takes over as Mark Zuckerberg. Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr, and Gbenga Akinnagbe co-star. Jeff Cronenweth shot it, the one clear craft link to David Fincher’s original. The budget is $50 million and the running time is 112 minutes. Sony is selling the film as a companion piece to The Social Network, not a sequel, and it premiered at London’s Curzon Mayfair on September 29.

Sorkin told the rest of the cast not to expect small talk from Strong.

He is going to treat you the way he imagines Mark treats the people around him. And that’s what happened. You cannot argue with the results.

Aaron Sorkin, writer-director

Strong stayed in the voice on set and, Sorkin said, in messages after hours. He also wrote the real Zuckerberg a letter saying he took the likeness seriously. The script draws on the Facebook Files, the 2021 leak that tied the company’s own research to teen harm, misinformation, and the January 6 attack. Whether that material still feels like news in 2026 is the commercial question hanging over an October date already crowding two other grown-up titles into the same Friday.

Fjord Opens on Neon’s Palme Friday

The other October 9 film is Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, which Neon is putting into theaters on the same calendar slot it used for Parasite, Anora, and Anatomy of a Fall. Mungiu won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, his second after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007. Fjord is also Neon’s seventh Palme in a row, after Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, Anora, and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident. Romania has submitted it for the 99th Academy Awards.

Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, a devout Romanian-Norwegian couple who move their five children to a small coastal village in her country. Bruises on their daughter at school set off a legal fight that swallows the family. The film runs 146 minutes. Cannes divided over it, which is Mungiu’s habit: an intimate moral dispute that becomes a public trial. Neon is betting the Palme still means a specialized audience will find it without a $125 million opening salvo.

Street Fighter and Clayface Eat Mid-October

The middle of the month belongs to brands. Paramount’s Street Fighter, directed by Kitao Sakurai, opens October 16 in IMAX. Andrew Koji and Noah Centineo play Ryu and Ken Masters in a 1993-set reboot, with Callina Liang as Chun-Li and a heavy supporting board that includes Jason Momoa, 50 Cent, David Dastmalchian, Cody Rhodes, and Eric André. AMC lists it at 1 hour 59 minutes and PG-13. Mary Parent, a producer on Digger, is also a producer here, which means the same executive is riding the prestige miss and the arcade reunion two weeks apart.

DC Studios then drops Clayface on October 23, a date Warner Bros. chose after pulling the film off September 11 to sit in the Halloween corridor. James Watkins directs from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Tom Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, a Gotham street kid turned leading man who is disfigured, then ruined by a treatment that turns his body toward living clay. Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, and Eddie Marsan co-star. Matt Reeves, Lynn Harris, James Gunn, and Peter Safran produce. The budget is about $40 million, the same neighborhood as Verity, and the running time is 108 minutes, among the shortest live-action DC features in years. Warner Bros. will release the film only in theaters in North America on October 23, with international dates beginning October 21.

There's no hiding. Search Clayface – only in theaters October 23. pic.twitter.com/w9b29haJGb

— Clayface Movie (@ClayfaceMovieDC) September 28, 2026

STILL AHEAD IN OCTOBER

• October 7: Rachel Morrison’s Love of Your Life, with Margaret Qualley, opens in select theaters before Prime Video on October 14.
• October 9: The Social Reckoning and Fjord share Friday with two different awards arguments, Silicon Valley and Cannes.
• October 16: Street Fighter takes the multiplexes in IMAX for a PG-13 arcade reunion.
• October 23: Clayface and Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love land on the same date, one wide, one limited.

The month also brings new work from Ben Affleck, Chris Rock, Romain Gavras, Marie Kreutzer, Alex Gibney, Taika Waititi, and Anton Corbijn, plus Paweł Pawlikowski’s first feature since Cold War. They will fight for the oxygen Clayface and Street Fighter do not use.

Possible Love Arrives With a Silver Lion and a Netflix Date

Lee Chang-dong’s first film in eight years, after Burning in 2018, is the quiet counterweight to that IP. Possible Love premiered in Venice competition on September 6 and won the Grand Jury Prize, the Silver Lion, plus the FIPRESCI prize. South Korea has submitted it for Best International Feature. It opened at home on September 23 and took in $908,728 from 115,938 admissions in five days. Australia follows on October 22. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Japan get it on October 23, the same day Clayface goes wide. After the theatrical window it arrives on Netflix worldwide on November 6.

Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu play a laid-off worker and his wife. Cho Yeo-jeong and Zo In-sung are the documentary filmmaker and her husband who cross their path. The film runs 164 minutes. Nineteen critics on Metacritic have it at 93. That is the profile of a movie that does not need Friday night at 3,300 sites. It needs a few good rooms, a nomination, and a streaming date that still feels like an event.

THE OCTOBER RELEASE CALENDAR

1. September 23, 2026: Possible Love opens in South Korea.
2. September 29, 2026: The Social Reckoning premieres at the Curzon Mayfair in London.
3. October 2, 2026: Digger and Verity open wide in the United States.
4. October 7, 2026: Love of Your Life begins a limited run, then hits Prime Video on October 14.
5. October 9, 2026: Fjord and The Social Reckoning open in theaters.
6. October 16, 2026: Street Fighter arrives nationwide in IMAX.
7. October 23, 2026: Clayface goes wide; Possible Love opens in select U.S. theaters.
8. November 6, 2026: Possible Love begins its global Netflix run.

Sunday will lock the Verity and Digger totals. Possible Love still has a November 6 streaming date after it shares October 23 with a DC body-horror picture that cost about as much as Verity and wants every Halloween screen it can get.