Box Office Round-up
Colleen Hoover is back at the top of the box office as Verity opened in the top spot with £3.2m. That’s the biggest opening for a film adapted from a Colleen Hoover book since 2024’s It Ends With Us, which opened with £4.5m and finished its run with £21.9m. The last Colleen Hoover film in cinemas, Reminders Of Him, opened with £1.1m and finished on £4.5m, so Verity is going to far surpass that.
Resident Evil had a good third weekend in second, adding £1.3m, which is down 40% from last weekend. That takes its total after 17 days in cinemas to £11.2m and it’s now comfortably the biggest Resident Evil film of all-time. The last Resident Evil film in cinemas was 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City which finished its run with £585k, and the best performing Resident Evil film until this new one, was 2010’s Resident Evil: Afterlife, which finished its run with £4.8m.
Brad Pitt continues to cement his status as a box office draw as Heart Of The Beast posted a decent second weekend in third, adding £1.1m, which is down just 26% from last weekend and takes its total to £4.1m. Director, David Ayer, has had two films in cinemas in the past two years and both starred Jason Statham, 2024’s The Beekeeper (£3.8m) and 2025’s A Working Man (£1.9m). Heart Of The Beast has already surpassed them both.
Tom Cruise is arguably the biggest movie star of the last forty years but even the biggest stars have the odd box office mis-step. Digger opened in fourth with £1.1m, which is the lowest opening for Cruise since American Made in 2017. That film finished its run with £5.8m, which would be a good target for Digger from here.
Sense & Sensibility rounded out the top five, adding £976k, which is down 35% from last weekend. That takes its total after 10 days in cinemas to £3.7m. The last big literary adaptation that Daisy Edgar-Jones starred in was 2022’s Where The Crawdads Sing, which finished its run with £8.4m. Hopefully Sense & Sensibility can get close to that.
Outside of the top five, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now less than £200k away from £100m, after adding £190k over the weekend.
Next Weekend
Other Mommy stars Jessica Chastain in a chiller that had one of the most memorable trailers in recent memory. Bela, an 8-year-old girl living in a home with marital problems, confronts a sinister entity which comes out of her closet. The presence, whom she calls "Other Mommy," becomes increasingly threatening to her and her family.
The Social Reckoning is the follow-up to The Social Network and is from writer-director Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing). It follows Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison, a young Facebook engineer, who enlisted the help of Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a Wall Street Journal reporter, to blow the whistle on the social network's most guarded secrets. Jeremy Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg.
The Uprising stars Andrew Garfield and is based on the true story of the uprising that inspired the legend of Robin Hood. Garfield stars as the leader of a rebellion against the tyranny of King Richard II in a fight for justice. Jamie Bell and Katherine Waterston co-star.
The Buzz
If, after Backrooms and Obsession, you are wondering what the next horror breakout could be, one potential contender is River a new horror from first-time feature director Joshua Giuliano.
River premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month in their midnight madness strand (like Obsession in 2025) and has received strong reviews.
The Playlist said ‘ultimately, Giuliano understands there is nothing more terrifying - or compelling - than normal people who find themselves in extraordinarily horrific scenarios and, through tooth and a lot of nails, push back against the notion of becoming easy victims.’
It was subsequently picked up for distribution by Blumhouse (who were involved with Backrooms and Obsession) for $10m. It’s about three siblings who, after being stranded in a boat on a country river, are stalked by a faceless killer. This is a horror title we could soon be hearing a lot more about ahead of its release on 22 January.
Across The Pond
Verity opened in the top spot in North America too, opening with $32.6m. Resident Evil fell to second, adding $12.5m, which takes its total to an impressive $124.9m. Heart Of The Beast came in third with $11m, which takes its total to $38.4m. Primetime again came in fourth, adding $8m, for a new total of $34.1m. Digger rounded out the top five, opening with $8m.
