It’s difficult to overstate the impact that the work of author Colleen Hoover has had on modern entertainment over the course of the past several years. Though she had been releasing work for years and even nabbed numerous placements on bestseller lists, it wasn’t until the early 2020s, amidst a global pandemic and foundational shifts in the social media landscape, that she really exploded in popularity. As “BookTok” took off (a whole host of content creators on TikTok who spoke about modern books), it brought Hoover’s work to a whole new level of popularity and resulted in numerous of her established works being adapted into films.
Now, the latest of these is coming to cinemas in the form of Verity, whose new trailer just released. Starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett, the film is an adaptation of Hoover’s 2018 novel of the same name. But where Hoover’s other previously adapted works were largely of a sentimental variety, focusing on the interpersonal drama of falling in and out of relationships with various shades of trauma applied for good measure, Verity is something distinctly different: it’s a pulpy thriller, with all of the brooding atmosphere and bloodshed that comes with that.
The first film to adapt Hoover’s work to the big screen was It Ends with Us in 2024, which became a whole controversial subject in and of itself, with multiple lawsuits and all. Without getting into the weeds on all of that, suffice it to say that It Ends with Us was a pretty massive hit, which demonstrated that Hoover’s newfound online audience could and would translate to ticket sales. Subsequent films like Regretting You and Reminders of Him may not have made quite as big of a splash in the years that followed, but they steadily earned profits and proved her to be a reliable draw, time and again.
That brings us to her fourth book to get the adaptation treatment: Verity. Notably, this novel fits much less easily into the widely marketable, easily digestible confines of the prior works, making the selling of it a bit trickier.
With this new trailer, the marketing for Verity seems to be leaning heavily into the horror elements at play within this psychological thriller story, and I think that’s a good call. Also, between director Michael Showalter’s eclectic history (this is putting it gently, the man’s career trajectory is genuinely insane, and I adore him for it) and some of the hammier line readings that Hathaway gets to sink her teeth into in this trailer, it’s up for debate as to exactly what kind of tonal tightrope the film is looking to walk.
If the marketing summons any similarities, it’s actually not to other Colleen Hoover films, but rather the other breakout BookTok adaptation of recent years, Paul Feig’s The Housemaid. That film dealt with a similarly layered, horror-tinged premise, and the marketing team behind Verity is smart to not shy away from those comparisons, as that film was a massive hit as well.
Here’s hoping they well and truly let Showalter and screenwriter Nick Antosca go off the rails with Verity and aren’t scared of isolating fragments of Hoover’s enormous fandom. You can’t please everyone, especially in this day and age where each individual reader has online platforms where they can share their opinions, but what you can do is let some truly distinct creative minds cook with a batshit-gonzo gothic horror premise starring three of the most exciting performers of their generation. Those are my hopes for Verity, and that is very much what this trailer is selling.
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