Verity fell 64%. Its hurricane Saturday was the day it held best

Verity took $4.4m on Saturday 10 October, 56.0% less than it took on its first Saturday. That was the film's best day-on-day hold of the weekend, and it was the day Amazon MGM says a hurricane kept its audience at home.

The headline number is the one everybody printed. Michael Showalter's Colleen Hoover adaptation fell 64% in its second weekend, to an estimated $11.5m, and gave up first place to Other Mommy, according to the Associated Press and The Numbers. Amazon MGM told reporters that Hurricane Isaias was part of the reason. Deadline reported that a large share of the film's business comes from the South and South Central states and that Saturday's takings were hit; TheWrap had the studio saying the storm kept south-eastern audiences away on Friday and Saturday both.

The storm was real. The daily grosses do not show it.

Three days, and the stormy one held best

Take the weekend apart using The Numbers' daily charts. Verity made $15.0m on its opening Friday, 2 October, then $10.0m on the Saturday and $7.0m on the Sunday, for $32.0m. A week later the same three days brought in $4.0m, $4.4m and $3.1m.

Friday looks dreadful: $4,007,000 against $15,004,153 is a fall of 73.3%. But that first Friday included $4.5m of Thursday-night previews, a figure Variety reported at the time. Strip them out and the true Friday was $10.5m, which makes the second Friday a 61.9% fall. Saturday, at $4,397,000 against $9,990,786, was down 56.0%. Sunday, which is still a studio estimate, was down 56.3%.

So the day Deadline singles out as storm-damaged is the day the film lost least. Friday, when Isaias was still offshore until the evening, was six points worse.

There is a fair objection here. Verity rose only 9.7% from Friday to Saturday, while Resident Evil rose 50% and Heart of the Beast 55%. A missing Saturday bump is what bad weather would look like.

It is also what a Hoover film looks like. Universal's Reminders of Him, released on 13 March with no hurricane anywhere near it, rose 13.5% from its second Friday to its second Saturday, The Numbers' daily figures show. On opening weekend, with previews removed, it dipped 4.0% from Friday to Saturday. Verity dipped 4.9%. These films are bought on Friday night by readers who have been waiting, and Saturday has never been their day.

What the storm could have cost

Isaias came ashore near Destin, on the Florida Panhandle, at about 8.30pm local time on Friday 9 October as a Category 2 hurricane, and had weakened to a post-tropical system over southern Alabama within hours, NBC News reported. Roughly 668,000 customers across Florida, Alabama and Georgia were without power early on Saturday, by NBC's count.

That is a bad night for a great many people. It is also a small slice of the American box office. Alabama had 5,024,279 residents at the 2020 census, by the Census Bureau's count, out of 331.4 million nationally, which is 1.5%.

Now the arithmetic. Had Verity fallen by the 55.5% that Reminders of Him fell, its weekend would have been $14.25m. It made $11.48m, so the gap to explain is $2.77m. Alabama's population share of a $14.25m weekend is about $216,000. Close every cinema in the state for all three days, then assume Alabamians buy Verity tickets at twice the national rate, and the storm accounts for $432,000, or 1.3 points of the drop. Getting to the full gap takes nearly 13 Alabamas.

This is a ceiling for the landfall zone, not a measurement, and it leaves out the Panhandle counties and a wet Saturday across Georgia. Amazon MGM has not published regional grosses, which is the only thing that would settle it. Until it does, a point or two is the generous reading.

The films with no excuse did better

The rest of the chart is the control group. Resident Evil fell 34%, Heart of the Beast 35%, Forgotten Island 38% and Primetime 48%. Together those four went from $38.4m to $24.0m, a fall of 37.7%, and every one of them held better than it had the weekend before, when their drops ran from 45% to 59%. Whatever Isaias did to cinemas in the Southeast, it is invisible in the national numbers.

The closest match for Verity is the film nobody has offered a weather report for. Warner Bros' Digger, which we costed last month, fell 72.0% on Friday, 50.9% on Saturday and 60.0% for the weekend. Verity fell 73.3%, 56.0% and 64.2%. The two opened on the same day, and both were graded C+ by CinemaScore's opening-night audiences, as TheWrap noted.

That grade is the cheaper explanation. TheWrap's own report put the storm alongside what it called a tepid reception to the film's downbeat ending, and the other Hoover adaptations suggest how much word of mouth is worth: It Ends with Us fell 52% in its second weekend in 2024 and Regretting You 43% a year later, on The Numbers' figures. Verity, at 64%, is the steepest of the four by more than eight points.

A hit that did not need the alibi

My view is that the hurricane line was a mistake, because the film is fine without it. Verity cost a reported $40m and had taken $113m worldwide after two weekends, per TheWrap, having earned 11.3% of its budget on preview night alone, as we worked out at the time. A front-loaded run on a C+ is an ordinary thing to have. Blaming the weather invites people to check the weather.

We ran the same test of bad grades on Other Mommy on Sunday. It will get its own second weekend on 16 October.

Before then, Monday's actuals replace the Sunday estimate, and the third weekend will be the cleaner read: no storm, no previews in the comparison, and a 55% fall would leave Verity at about $5.2m.