The Colleen Hoover cinematic universe is forging ahead with Verity teaser trailer

Have you ever heard of the 2017 romance drama series Confess? Don’t worry, no one else has either.

It featured relative unknowns Katie Leclerc and Ryan Cooper, and was made for a defunct American streaming platform called go90. If you’re so inclined, today you can buy the whole season on digital for $9.99.

You will however, soon hear a lot about Verity, a star-studded cinema movie with Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, and directed by Michael Showalter, the journeyman filmmaker behind The Big Sick and Wet Hot American Summer.

What those two titles have in common is Colleen Hoover, the best-selling American author who has been publishing since 2012 but whose BookTok-driven resurgence has given her projects a hell of a step-up in cachet.

Hoover’s stories have become an intellectual property force in Hollywood. In 2022, at the height of the BookTok craze, she held six of the top 10 positions on the New York Times fiction paperback bestseller list, and sold 8.6 million copies that year.

As Australian writer Liane Moriarty discovered, all you need is one massive hit adapted from your tomes, in her case, Big Little Lies, and the rest of your catalogue will become in-demand from producers looking to cash in.

For Hoover, that was It Ends With Us, which is now better remembered for the still ongoing ugly dispute between its principals Justin Baldoni (actor, director, producer) and Blake Lively (actor, producer).

It Ends With Us was a bona fide commercial hit. From a production budget of $US25 million, it grossed $US351 million at the box office, despite, or maybe because of, the off-screen dramas including criticism the movie was marketed as a frothy romance best enjoyed with friends wearing florals, rather than what was supposed to be a serious portrayal of family violence.

The charges levied at the film were similar to what critics have said about Hoover’s book, that it trivialised or romanticised toxic relationships, but that hasn’t stopped the writer’s continued rise in the Hollywood machine.

Hoover’s novels are female-led, emotional and dramatic, and it speaks to a demographic of readers who want to fully dive into the highs and lows of all the feels. Her works were propelled onto the bestseller charts years after their publication thanks to BookTok which discovered Hoover’s novels during the pandemic.

That’s the huge distinction between Confess, that first largely forgotten TV show, and the wave of screen projects since. When social media went nuts, movie producers noticed, and threw much bigger talent behind the adaptations.

Regretting You was announced the same month as It Ends With Us was released, and came out a year later with Allison Williams and Dave Franco in the lead roles. This was followed by Reminders of Him.

Neither films hit the financial highs of It Ends With Us, but with relatively lower budgets ($US30 million for Regretting You and $US25 million for Reminders of Him), it didn’t have to. Both films were still profitable at the box office ($US90 million and $US88 million).

Like Nicholas Sparks’s film adaptations (The Notebook, The Last Song, A Walk to Remember, The Lucky One and more), Hoover’s have the same non-descript names and a female audience primed for mid-budget, emotionally charged romances. Never mind the Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Verity, whose first trailer was released today ahead of its October release, is a slight step outside of those three earlier films in that it is a psychological thriller rather than a romance.

It will perhaps be more in the vein of box office surprise hit The Housemaid, the Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney movie adapted from a Frieda McFadden’s book that grossed $US401 million from a $US35 million budget.

Hoover originally self-published Verity in 2018, and was only picked up by a Hachette imprint in 2021 after the BookTok videos started to take off.

The story follows a struggling writer (Johnson) who is hired to complete a novel series after its author, Verity (Hathaway) is hurt from a mysterious accident. Entering Verity and her husband’s (Hartnett) lives puts her in peril after she discovers an unfinished manuscript that suggests something more sinister is going on.

These Hoover movies may not be narratively connected in a cinematic universe, but she is certainly starting to build something resembling one. With a built-in, invested audience and reasonable production budgets, there are clearly commercial reasons for it to grow.

Especially as she has two dozen books to her name. Maybe someone will even give Confess a do-over.