The film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel "Verity" arrives on Amazon Prime Video with several of the book's most graphic and controversial plot points removed, according to a breakdown of the differences between the two versions. The movie, starring Anne Hathaway as the paralyzed author Verity Crawford and Dakota Johnson as ghostwriter Lowen Ashleigh, compresses the novel's sprawling backstory into a tighter on-screen narrative.
The most significant cut is the book's graphic abortion scene, in which Lowen terminates a pregnancy after learning the baby may have been fathered by Verity's husband, Jeremy. The film replaces that storyline with a far less explicit resolution, removing one of the novel's most debated sequences. A separate explicit sex scene between Lowen and Jeremy was also trimmed for the screen.
Amazon MGM Studios released the film after Hoover's novel sold more than 3 million copies and spent months atop the New York Times bestseller list, following the author's earlier blockbuster "It Ends With Us." The studio has not disclosed the film's production budget, but the cast alone — Hathaway, Johnson, and Josh Hartnett as Jeremy — signals a major streaming bet on Hoover's fanbase.
The film retains the novel's central hook: Lowen is hired to finish the remaining books in Verity's series and discovers an unpublished manuscript that appears to be Verity's autobiography, detailing the deaths of her twin daughters and her hatred of her husband. The movie keeps the manuscript-within-the-story structure, though it shortens several of the manuscript's most disturbing passages.
The ending remains the book's signature ambiguity. In both versions, Lowen finds a letter from Verity to Jeremy that suggests the manuscript was fabricated as a writing exercise, leaving readers and viewers to decide whether Verity is a murderer or a victim. The film preserves that unresolved final note, which has fueled years of debate among Hoover's readers.
Supporting characters also shift in the transition. The film expands the role of Verity's editor and adjusts the timeline of Lowen's stay at the Crawford home, compressing weeks of the novel into a shorter on-screen span. Hoover served as an executive producer on the project, giving her a hand in which elements survived the adaptation.
The movie lands as Amazon leans harder into book-to-screen adaptations, a strategy that has produced hits like "The Summer I Turned Pretty" and the upcoming "Fourth Wing" series. For Hoover, whose books have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, "Verity" represents her third major adaptation in two years.
