‘Verity’ Is Trash. But Is It Good Trash? Plus: ‘Digger’ Flopped and Warner Bros. Is No More.

Sean Fennessey (0:16)

I'm Sean Fennessey.

Amanda Dobbins (0:16)

I'm Amanda Dobbins.

Sean Fennessey (0:17)

And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Verity and endings. Today on the show, we are talking about the new Colleen Hoover adaptation, Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. It was the biggest movie of the weekend, and is also a heaping pile of steamy, pulpy trash. But is it good trash? And what do we mean by that exactly? Amanda and I will explain. There was also a dramatic change in studio leadership at the newly merged Warner Bros. Paramount over the weekend, and we will talk about that, as well as the failure of the movie Digger. It's all coming up right after this.

This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great. Impressions reach and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that, bull spend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? LinkedIn ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. You can target by company, industry, job title and more. So cut the bull spend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/thebigpicture.

That's linkedin.com/thebigpicture.

Terms and conditions apply.

SPEAKER_3 (1:37)

Your credit card company is hoping you don't hear this. They're charging you 21% APR interest, making it hard to pay down your balance. A home equity loan from Rocket Mortgage could cut your interest rate by more than half. So you could wipe out your high interest credit card debt with the equity you've built in your home without touching your current mortgage rate. See how much you could save at rocketmortgage.com. Rocket Mortgage LLC, license in 50 states. nmlsconsumeraccess.org number 3030 Call 800-4-ROCKET for full program details.

Sean Fennessey (2:07)

Okay, Amanda, a lot happened over the weekend. I've been in New York, living a fabulous life. You've been in Los Angeles, living another life. I wish you well.

Amanda Dobbins (2:19)

How was dinner with my husband?

Sean Fennessey (2:23)

I did, in fact, have dinner with your husband in New York. We were both away from our children and we were living it up. We went to an old haunt of ours that we dined in many times and we had a nice time. We are working here. Your husband is working and I'm working. Maybe not as hard as you're working. You know who wasn't working?

It was the film digger. The film digger did not work for audiences around this great nation. $7.9 million opening weekend. Was that the final tally? I didn't even update the final numbers, but boy, this movie did not perform well on a budget north of $150 million.

What do you make that?

Amanda Dobbins (2:57)

Not surprised.

The main reaction, the only thing that I was very sure about, well, I was sure of two things. One, I found the experience of watching the film irritating, and two, that it was not commercial. So that seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, that the movie just really was so un-commercial that people gave up going to see it. I do feel, this weekend, anecdotally, everyone I saw wanted to ask me about Digger and what I thought about it, but none of them had seen it, and no one really had plans to see it. You know, we said on our Digger episode, which I hope people will listen to after seeing the film, that we hoped they would see the film and before they listened to the podcast. No one did. Everyone was just like, no, no, no, I'm not gonna bother with this. Maybe I'll check it out on streaming, but this is so DOA that I don't have to go. So I do think that the reviews and just the negative buzz and tracking probably pressed it down even further.

Sean Fennessey (3:59)

I think you're right. I think the word was out pretty quickly that this was maybe not for everyone, but it still, it had a car crash quality. And so I think there was a curiosity about what it was that people were checking. So there's a lot of media about the film. There are a lot of takes flying around about the film. I think you and I anticipated correctly that there would also be a kind of counter wave, that there would be some defense of the movie, maybe even a rising cult of this movie. And that's interesting. I've been trying to sort it out. There's a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about with respect to that. One of them is that, you know, many of Alejandro Iñárritu's compatriots publicly went to bat for him. Alfonso Cuarón took to x.com, the Everything app, to share some thoughts about other films historically that received negative reviews and then were ultimately praised as all-time classics. Which, you know what? I love my friends too. You know? I got...