Weekly

Tom Cruise Gambles on Digger, Verity Bets on the Book Club

This week in movies and TV: Tom Cruise and Iñárritu open Digger, Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson open Verity, plus the new releases worth your weekend, what's airing now, and what's coming next.

Friday, October 2, 2026 · By MoviesPack

For about thirty years the rule in Hollywood has been simple. Tom Cruise is the safe bet. You put him in a movie, you put him on a motorcycle or the side of a plane, and the audience shows up. This weekend that rule gets turned upside down. The biggest movie star alive is opening the riskiest film of his career, and the movie with the clearer path to a big number is a twisty paperback thriller with no explosions in it at all.

That's the whole week in one sentence: the star is gambling, and the book club is the house. Fall movie season, which I've been promising you for a month, finally arrives today. It just doesn't look the way anyone expected.

The big swing

Digger (2026)

Digger is the one I'd go out for, and I'm not entirely sure it's going to work, which is part of why. Alejandro G. Iñárritu directs Tom Cruise as the most powerful man in the world, a figure who sets off a catastrophe and then races to convince everyone he's the person who can save them from it before it swallows everything. That's the setup. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller and Michael Stuhlbarg fill out a cast that reads like somebody's dream festival lineup. What makes this interesting is the pairing. Iñárritu makes punishing, ambitious, occasionally exhausting films. Birdman was about an actor's ego eating him alive. The Revenant was about a man refusing to die out of pure spite. Cruise, meanwhile, has spent most of the last decade inside the Mission: Impossible machine, playing a hero whose defining quality is that he is always right. Putting him in the hands of a director whose specialty is men who are badly, catastrophically wrong is the most promising thing Cruise has done in years. When he has let a serious filmmaker make him unlikable, we've gotten Magnolia and Collateral. Those are two of his best performances, and neither one has a stunt in it. The early scores are encouraging: a 7.5 on TMDB, though from only a couple of dozen voters so far. The commercial picture is murkier. Box office trackers spent the week posting that Digger's presales were growing unusually slowly heading into opening day, and Warner Bros. has it in more than 3,300 theaters, so there's a lot of seats to fill. If you've been asking for big studios to put real money behind strange movies by great directors, this is the weekend to put your money where your mouth is. The Digger ratings page will tell you within a few days whether audiences agree with me.

The safe bet that isn't playing it safe

Verity (2026)

Verity is Colleen Hoover's thriller, and if you've seen the book on an airport shelf in the last five years you already know roughly how many people are about to buy a ticket. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen, a struggling writer hired by a grieving husband (Josh Hartnett) to finish the bestselling series his wife Verity can no longer write after an accident. Lowen moves into the family house to work through Verity's notes. Anne Hathaway plays Verity. What Lowen finds in those papers is the whole movie, and I'm not going to say another word about it. Hoover adaptations have a reputation problem. It Ends with Us made a fortune and got buried under a cloud of behind-the-scenes drama. Verity has a better shot at being taken seriously for one reason: it's a genre picture first. This is a domestic noir in the Gone Girl tradition, and that genre lives or dies on the actors being willing to go big and nasty. Hathaway, who has been quietly picking stranger roles for a while now, seems like she was cast specifically to go big and nasty. Michael Showalter directs, and he's better known for warm comedies than for menace, which is either the miscalculation or the secret weapon. I lean toward secret weapon. A director who understands how to make you like people can make it hurt when you stop trusting them. Industry projections have it opening north of $55 million worldwide, which would make it the clear winner of the weekend. TMDB has it at a 6.9 from early viewers, and it reaches digital on October 27 if you'd rather read the book first and watch at home. If you can't wait that long, where to watch Verity has the theater details, and if you've already seen it, The Girl on the Train and Misery are the obvious next stops for writers in very bad houses.

The quiet one worth seeking out

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (2026)

The title is a mouthful, and the movie behind it sounds like the real find of the week. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother stars Mahershala Ali as Latif, a deeply religious hitman in Houston trying to hold his job, his faith and his kids together. Then his wife dies, and he has to cross the city to keep his children safe while everything he believes starts to come apart. John Cho and Giancarlo Esposito co-star, and Bassam Tariq directs. A hitman movie where the central conflict is spiritual rather than tactical is a rare thing, and Ali is the right actor for it. Since Moonlight he's been the best in the business at playing men whose gentleness and violence live in the same body. It expands to more cities today and goes wide on October 16, so if it's not near you yet, it will be.

Also out this week

The rest of the slate is mostly about fun. Rolling Loud (2026) is a comedy with Owen Wilson as a dad who sneaks his 13-year-old son into the giant hip-hop festival behind his wife's back, loses the kid in the crowd, and teams up with two unlikely strangers to find him before anyone at home figures out what happened. Matt Rife co-stars. It's the kind of premise that writes its own trailer, and you can find more like it here.

Horror fans get a monster movie. Beware Boiúna (2026), from Wrong Turn director Mike P. Nelson, drops a medical mission into the Amazon and lets an enormous ancient predator decide who goes home. Logan Marshall-Green and Jessica Rothe star. Nelson did a Q&A on r/movies this week, which is a nice touch for a film that clearly knows its audience, and you can track where it's playing.

At home, The Stunt Driver tells the true story of Ken Carter, the Montreal daredevil who spent the 1970s trying to jump the St. Lawrence River in a rocket car. Jay Baruchel plays the man, with Ed Helms and Ben Foster around him, and Michael Dowse (Goon) directs. Canadian folk legend, rocket car, Ben Foster: I'm in. The Deputy (2026) is a lean digital thriller about a young deputy who loses the body he was assigned to guard at a crime scene and ends up in the sights of the people who took it, with William H. Macy, Tiffany Haddish and Stephen Dorff. Music fans should know about LINKIN PARK: UNSHATTER, the band's documentary about rebuilding after Chester Bennington's death, which opened in limited release this week with very warm early scores.

If last week's leftovers are still on your list, Unabomber is on Netflix and The Love Hypothesis is still the most popular new release in our whole database, which tells you Prime Video picked the right week to drop a romcom.

What's worth your couch time

The headline on television is less glamorous and more interesting than another prestige premiere: network TV is back, and it owns the charts. The fall broadcast season has fully kicked in, and the on-air charts this week are wall-to-wall with shows your parents watch. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, now in its late twenties and still going, is sitting near the very top, alongside the One Chicago trio and FBI. There's a lesson in that. Streaming spent a decade convincing us that TV had to be an event. Turns out a lot of people just want a reliable hour of television that's there every week. If that's you, shows like Chicago Fire and shows like Elsbeth will keep you fed through the winter.

For something with more ambition, Dark Matter is back on Apple TV. It's the multiverse thriller about a physicist yanked into a life he didn't choose, and it remains one of the more underrated shows on the service. And for the comedy fans, Abbott Elementary is back in its regular slot, still the best case that a network sitcom can be as sharp as anything on cable. The nicest surprise on the chart is the Phineas and Ferb revival, which is pulling the kind of numbers that suggest the original's audience grew up and brought their own kids along.

Coming next

October 9 is where Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning arrives in about 2,500 theaters, and Jessica Chastain fronts Rob Savage's Other Mommy, which r/movies spent the week dissecting via a deeply unsettling new poster. Bollywood fans get Udta Teer the same day, with Ayushmann Khurrana as a Pakistani spy who loses his memory and wakes up convinced he's an Indian counter-terror officer. That is a premise I'd watch on a dare.

October 16 is the stacked one. Street Fighter lands, but the title I'm more curious about is Whalefall, from No One Will Save You director Brian Duffield. Austin Abrams plays a young man who dives off the California coast searching for his late father's remains and gets swallowed by a sperm whale, with one hour of oxygen to work out how to escape. Josh Brolin plays the father. It's either the most original survival movie of the year or a very expensive joke, and I suspect the former. The next day, Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away returns to theaters for its 25th anniversary from October 17 to 21. If you've only ever seen it on a laptop, fix that.

Then on October 23, DC's horror-tinged Clayface follows a rising Gotham movie star who gets disfigured by a crime boss and turns to an experimental treatment that fixes his face and breaks his mind. The animated fantasy Wildwood opens the same day.

What everyone's talking about

The r/movies megathread this week bundled Digger, Verity, Unabomber and The Stunt Driver together, but Digger and Verity each pulled their own dedicated discussion threads, which is about as clear a sign as you get that people went opening night and came out wanting to argue. Over on r/boxoffice, the mood was sharply split. Verity's projections had people excited; Digger's slow presales had people nervous. The sharpest stat of the week, though, was a sobering one: Warner Bros. has now gone twelve straight months without a single film crossing $100 million domestically. Digger is carrying more than its own weight this weekend.

Meanwhile the summer's giant refuses to leave. The Odyssey is still adding to a domestic total above $618 million, and its weekday grosses actually went up week over week, which basically never happens this late in a run. Disney's re-release of Avengers: Endgame has quietly crossed $31 million on its own, proving once again that the most reliable new release in Hollywood is an old one.

The rest of the chatter was the usual pile of announcements. First reactions to M. Night Shyamalan's Remain, with Jake Gyllenhaal, came out of Beyond Fest, though the film doesn't open until February. Bradley Cooper signed on to a new G.I. Joe from Danny McBride, Walton Goggins joined the Miami Vice reboot, and Richard Linklater talked about shooting a Merrily We Roll Along musical over twenty years, Boyhood-style. And if you saw Primetime last weekend, you'll enjoy this: Lance Oppenheim's next project is a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes made with Nathan Fielder, and Fielder's account of living with Holmes during the shoot was one of the most-read stories of the week.

If none of that helps you pick a movie tonight, our Discover tool will hand you one in about ten seconds.

The bottom line

Go see Digger. Not because it's sure to be great, but because a Tom Cruise movie that might fail is far more exciting than one that can't. If you want the sure thing, Verity is a nasty, well-cast thriller that should send you out of the theater arguing. And if you can find it, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother might turn out to be the one people are still talking about in December.

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