Colleen Hoover's "Verity," the erotic thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, opened at No. 1 this weekend, and Variety reports the film's original "dark phoenix" ending was scrapped after focus group screenings rejected it.
The ending they cut was an actual twist. In the "dark phoenix" version, the ghostwriter Lowen gets in the car, puts on sunglasses, and rides off hand out the window to a song, the master villain the whole time. Then it cuts back to the lake, and Verity's eyes open underwater. The dead woman is still moving. Showalter called it "the ending we always thought we were gonna do."
The focus group said no. Showalter's explanation is the most honest description of audience research in years: "The audience wanted her to be like, 'What the f* have I done?' We realized the audience is Lowen and the audience wasn't ready to put those glasses on." So the third act got reworked into a shrug, which is the word for it. The movie now ends in not-knowing, the industry's term for letting a room of strangers vote on your climax.
Here is the joke: the film is a "flat-footed dud" to the critics, it took a bigger beating than "a piece of beef hanging in Rocky Balboa's meat locker," and it is still on pace to be Hathaway's third No. 1 of the year. Focus groups don't make good movies. They make safe movies, and safe movies sell. The author, meanwhile, is "couldn't be happier" that the screenings "really helped." The source material is now the customer service rep for the product.
YOUR TURN: When the test audience says "I didn't like the ending" and the fix is "end on a shrug," is that a movie or a poll?
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