The Original ‘Verity’ Ending Was Too Dark for Focus Groups
by Chrissy Stockton · Thought CatalogUpdated 2 minutes ago, October 2, 2026
Warning: spoilers ahead.
Dakota Johnson’s Lowen Ashleigh spends the entirety of Michael Showalter’s Verity trying to uncover the truth about the mysterious author she’s been hired to ghostwrite for — and still walks away not fully knowing what she’s done. Lowen is brought on by Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) to finish a book series written by his wife, Verity (Anne Hathaway), who appears paralyzed and unable to speak or move after a devastating accident. While digging through Verity’s notes, Lowen finds a manuscript describing, in chilling detail, how Verity deliberately caused her own daughter’s drowning.
As Lowen falls for Jeremy, she discovers Verity has actually been faking her paralysis the entire time. At Lowen’s urging, Jeremy strangles Verity, and together they dump her body in a lake. Six months later, a now-pregnant Lowen finds a letter revealing a second, contradictory version of events: that the manuscript was pure fiction, and that Jeremy had actually tried to kill Verity after reading it, not because of anything she’d really done. The film ends with Lowen leaving with Jeremy anyway, still unsure which version of the story, if either, was ever true.
That ambiguity was almost erased entirely. Showalter told Variety that one discarded ending had Lowen slip on a pair of sunglasses in the car and visibly relax, as though she’d orchestrated the entire thing from the start — before cutting back underwater to Verity, who opens her eyes. “We tried a hundred million different ways to end this movie,” Showalter said. “Figuring out how to end the movie was the biggest challenge and the last thing that we did.”
What changed his mind was audience testing. Focus groups made up of both people who’d read Colleen Hoover‘s novel and people who hadn’t consistently responded the same way: they wanted Lowen to stay uncertain, not to embrace what she’d done. “We realized the audience is Lowen,” Showalter explained, “and the audience wasn’t ready to put those glasses on.”
Hoover, who consulted on the adaptation, ultimately backed the ambiguous ending that made it to screen: “I feel like you walk away from the movie with the same feelings you walk away from the book with, and that was what I was hoping we would ultimately end up with. Those screenings really helped.”
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