Anne Hathaway Has Five Movies From Five Studios in 2026. The Worst-Reviewed One Opens Today, and It Is Tracking to Beat Tom Cruise Anyway.

On Thursday afternoon, previews started for two R-rated movies built around two of the most famous actors alive. One cost a reported $125 million. The other cost $40 million. By Sunday, if the forecasts hold, the cheaper one will have opened at roughly double the bigger one's number.

The expensive one is Tom Cruise's Digger, which we previewed last week. The cheap one is Verity, a Colleen Hoover thriller starring Anne Hathaway. It is her fifth movie of 2026, and it has the worst reviews of the five. Variety projects it to open at $30 million to $35 million from 3,510 theaters anyway, which would make it Hathaway's third No. 1 opening of the year.

Five movies, five studios, one very strange year

Hathaway's 2026 came from five different distributors (A24, 20th Century Studios, Universal, Warner Bros., and Amazon MGM) in five genres that have almost nothing to do with each other. The first four cost about $455 million in reported budgets and have grossed about $2.58 billion worldwide. Here is how each one landed.

April: Mother Mary, the flop she sang for

David Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Green Knight) wrote and directed this A24 drama about a pop star who reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer (Michaela Coel) on the eve of a comeback. Hathaway sings every track on the soundtrack album, with original songs from Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA twigs. Critics were respectful (69 percent on Rotten Tomatoes). Audiences stayed home: about $3 million worldwide against a reported $20 million budget. It has been on HBO Max since August, as we noted in our August streaming picks.

Make your tier list right here

Five Nolan films, head-to-head. Tap the one you prefer and we will build your order, then label it S through D.

Which do you prefer?

Inception2010

VS

The Dark Knight2008

Tap your favorite

May: The Devil Wears Prada 2, the sequel that tripled the original

Twenty years after the first film, Hathaway went back to Runway as Andy Sachs, opposite Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci. The sequel opened May 1 to $76.7 million, nearly triple the original's $27.5 million debut, and held No. 1 for two weekends. It finished at $220.6 million domestic and $693.2 million worldwide on a $100 million budget, with an A-minus CinemaScore. It streams on Disney+ and Hulu.

July: The Odyssey, the biggest movie of her career by a mile

Her third film with Christopher Nolan, after The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, casts her as Penelope, holding Ithaca together while Odysseus (Matt Damon) fights his way home. It opened to $123.5 million on July 17 and now stands at $1.758 billion worldwide and $619 million domestic. That makes it the highest-grossing R-rated film ever and the biggest release in Universal's history, a record we broke down in September. Her previous career high was The Dark Knight Rises, at about $1.08 billion. Critics have also put her Penelope in the awards conversation.

August: The End of Oak Street, the dinosaur movie that got squeezed

David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) wrote and directed this one, originally titled Flowervale Street, with J.J. Abrams producing. It casts Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as parents whose 1982 Michigan street gets pulled through a wormhole into the age of dinosaurs. Critics liked it more than anything she made this year except The Odyssey, but it opened third with $21 million in the middle of Spider-Man's record run and finished at $121.2 million worldwide against an $85 million budget.

October: Verity, the one critics did not like

Nick Antosca adapted Hoover's novel and Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) directed. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired by Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) to finish the bestselling series his wife can no longer write after an accident. Hathaway plays the wife, Verity, and she is also one of the film's producers.

The reviews are the worst of Hathaway's year: around 40 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from nearly 90 critics and a 45 on Metacritic. Variety's Guy Lodge called it "a flat-footed dud, at once overwrought and underplotted." Mashable's Kristy Puchko was kinder: "It's sort of weird, sort of sexy, and sort of funny." Critics who disliked the film were generally easier on Hathaway than on the movie around her.

None of that seems to matter to the people buying tickets. The last major Hoover adaptation, It Ends with Us, opened to $50 million in August 2024. A start of $30 million or more would give Hathaway her third-biggest opening of 2026, behind only The Odyssey and Prada.

Where Digger fits

Here is the interesting part: critics barely separated the two movies. Digger sits at 54 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with a 46 on Metacritic, one point above Verity. Variety projects it at $12 million to $15 million from 3,300 theaters, on a reported budget of $125 million that some reports put closer to $180 million (Warner Bros. disputes that figure).

So the gap is not quality, at least as critics measure it. It is the audience each star brings. Hoover readers know exactly what Verity is and are showing up for it. Cruise spent nine years making nothing but Mission: Impossible and Top Gun movies, and now he is asking that crowd to follow him into an oil-tycoon satire. Hathaway spent the same stretch moving between studios and genres, and this year it paid off.

They will not be rivals for long. In August, Cruise announced that Hathaway is joining him in Days of Thunder 2 for Paramount, with Jonathan Levine directing. Cruise returns as Cole Trickle, and Hathaway plays a NASCAR team owner and engineer. It opens June 2, 2028.

Her 2026, ranked two ways

Put the five side by side and the money and the critics agree on exactly one thing.

By worldwide box office

1. The Odyssey: $1.758 billion
2. The Devil Wears Prada 2: $693.2 million
3. The End of Oak Street: $121.2 million
4. Mother Mary: about $3 million
5. Verity: opening this weekend, projected at $30 million to $35 million domestic

By Rotten Tomatoes score

1. The Odyssey: mid-90s
2. The End of Oak Street: 86 percent
3. The Devil Wears Prada 2: 78 percent
4. Mother Mary: 69 percent
5. Verity: about 40 percent

The Odyssey tops both lists. After that they split. The dinosaur movie critics liked made less than a fifth of what the sequel made. Your own order will probably look like neither.

She won an Oscar for Les Misérables in 2013 and then spent a few years as the internet's favorite punching bag. This year is a fairly thorough answer. To settle where Penelope lands against Selina Kyle and Dr. Amelia Brand, start with our Christopher Nolan movies ranked list, then rank her whole filmography head to head in a movie tier list on Shortlist. Our guess: hardly anyone puts Verity in the middle.

Frequently asked