Colleen Hoover just made $351 million at the box office with It Ends With Us, and apparently that was the signal to completely abandon the formula that got her there. Her next movie, Verity, drops the weepy relationship drama entirely and goes full psychological thriller – R-rated, twisted, possibly with murder. It’s a gamble that’ll either prove Hoover’s name sells tickets no matter what genre she’s playing in, or it’ll show us that her audience showed up for the tears and trauma bonds, not the author’s name on the poster.

The Formula That Printed Money

Here’s what worked: relationships falling apart in real time, grief you could feel in your chest, betrayal that made you want to throw your book across the room. It Ends With Us gave audiences all of that, wrapped in a domestic abuse storyline that people either found cathartic or exploitative depending on who you ask. But like it or not, it made $351 million worldwide. That’s not niche. That’s a cultural moment.

The other adaptations in the pipeline – Regretting You, Reminders of Him – they’re all staying in that lane. Emotional fallout, messy feelings, the kind of drama that makes you cry on an airplane. Hoover built an empire on making people feel things, usually sad things, usually about love gone wrong or people trying to hold it together when everything’s breaking. And the box office numbers said keep doing exactly that. It's worth remembering Lee Child's falling out with Tom Cruise's Reacher movies, a reminder that box office success doesn't always keep an author in control of their own adaptations.

Then Verity Shows Up

But Verity? Completely different animal. Yeah, there’s still a relationship at the center because it’s Colleen Hoover, she can’t help herself. But this one’s being sold as a psychological thriller where you’re supposed to be scared, not sobbing. There’s suspicion, manipulation, someone in the Crawford house who might be dangerous. It’s the first adaptation that really pushes against the “sad girl autumn” brand Hoover’s been riding.

And I mean, look – the book was different too. Verity’s always been the weird one in her catalog, the one that readers either obsess over or can’t finish because it gets dark in ways her other stuff doesn’t. So adapting it was always going to mean stepping outside the comfort zone. The question is whether her audience will follow her there.

What’s Actually at Stake Here

The thing is, we don’t really know yet if Colleen Hoover is a box office draw on her own, or if It Ends With Us just hit at the exact right moment with the exact right story. Was it her name that sold those tickets, or was it the subject matter? Was it the built-in fanbase, or was it Blake Lively and the discourse around the movie that kept it in the headlines for weeks?

Verity’s going to answer that. If it does even half of what It Ends With Us did, then yeah, Hoover’s name alone can move an audience across genres. But if it stumbles – if the people who showed up for romantic trauma drama don’t want psychological thriller Hoover – then the lesson is pretty clear: the formula mattered more than the author.

Not gonna lie, I’m kind of fascinated by this. Because scrapping a $351 million formula is either extremely confident or extremely risky, and I’m not sure the studios know which one it is yet. They’re basically using Verity as a test case to see if Hoover can do what Stephen King does, where the name on the cover guarantees an audience regardless of whether it’s a haunted car or a prison drama.

The Thriller Lane Is Crowded

Here’s where it gets tricky, though. The romantic drama space that It Ends With Us occupied? Not a lot of competition there, honestly. Hollywood’s been weirdly gun-shy about making mid-budget relationship dramas for years, so when one actually lands and connects, it can run the table. But psychological thrillers? That’s a packed genre. Gone Girl, The Woman in the Window, every twisty Netflix thing that drops every three months – audiences have options, and they’ve seen this kind of story before.

So Verity needs to either be genuinely great, or it needs Hoover’s fanbase to show up purely out of loyalty. And I don’t know if loyalty alone gets you to $300 million when you’re competing with every other domestic thriller that’s trying to be the next Girl on the Train.

“Verity could prove Colleen Hoover movies are bigger than romantic drama, but its box office will also show how much her name alone really sells.”

What Happens If It Works

If Verity actually pulls this off – if it makes real money and proves Hoover can genre-hop – then we’re probably looking at a complete recalibration of how her books get adapted. Suddenly every publisher with a Hoover-adjacent author is going to be pitching their psychological thrillers as the next big thing, and studios are going to start looking at her entire backlist differently. Maybe some of the earlier, weirder stuff that didn’t fit the It Ends With Us mold suddenly becomes adaptable.

But if it doesn’t work? Then we’re back to the formula. More weepy dramas, more relationship trauma, more movies that make you cry and then feel vaguely manipulated about it later. Which, fine – clearly there’s an audience for that. But it would also mean that Hoover’s locked into one lane at the box office, and that lane might get old faster than anyone wants to admit.

The Real Question Nobody’s Asking

What’s kind of wild to me is that we’re treating this like a binary – either Hoover’s name sells tickets or it doesn’t. But the actual answer is probably more complicated and way less satisfying. Maybe her name sells tickets to women 18-34 who loved the books. Maybe it sells tickets when the marketing is good and the casting is right. Maybe it sells tickets for romantic drama but not thrillers, or vice versa.

The problem is that studios need a clean answer because they’re trying to figure out how many more Colleen Hoover movies to greenlight and at what budget. Verity’s basically a $40-50 million question mark (I’m guessing on the budget, they haven’t announced it, but that’s the range for this kind of thing). And depending on how it performs, we’re either going to see five more Hoover adaptations announced by 2027, or we’re going to see a very quiet retreat back to the tried-and-true tearjerker formula.

Personally? I think it’s going to do okay but not great. The fanbase will show up opening weekend, but I’m not sure it has the legs that It Ends With Us had. That movie became an event, a thing people argued about and took sides on. Verity feels more like a solid genre entry that’ll do its thing and then disappear into the streaming void six weeks later. But hey, I’ve been wrong before. Maybe this is the one that proves Colleen Hoover can sell anything with her name on it. We’ll find out soon enough.