The Ending 'Verity' Almost Had: A Villain Reveal Killed by Focus Groups

Michael Showalter shot an entirely different ending for "Verity" — one in which Lowen Ashleigh, the character played by Dakota Johnson, puts on a pair of sunglasses and reveals herself as the true mastermind, while Anne Hathaway's Verity opens her eyes at the bottom of the lake. Test audiences refused to accept it.

The director detailed the discarded finale in an interview with Variety. "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."

"Verity," adapted from Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel and now playing in theaters, stars Johnson as Lowen, a struggling writer hired by Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) to ghostwrite the final installment of his wife's series. Verity Crawford (Hathaway) sits wheelchair-bound, mute and motionless after an accident — until Lowen discovers a manuscript suggesting her idol tried to drown her own two children, killing her daughter. The film ends with Jeremy choking Verity to death at Lowen's urging, and a coda in which a letter under the floorboards implies the manuscript may have been a writing exercise and Verity innocent — or not. A pregnant Lowen drives off with Jeremy, the truth left unresolved.

Showalter had planned something sharper. "There's two very significant other ways that the movie ended," he told Variety. In one version, Lowen declares in the car, "I don't know who to believe. One thing's for sure: Verity was a master manipulator." Then comes the twist: "she puts on a pair of sunglasses, leans back, and has this very cat-with-a-mouse-in-its-mouth look, puts her hand out the window, and as they're driving away and a song is playing, she's making [waves through the air] with her hand. So, the idea is that Lowen is the master villain. And then, you cut back to Verity sinking into the lake and her eyes open."

In that cut, Verity was still alive — and Lowen was the killer.

Showalter wanted to keep it. "We tried a hundred different versions of that — of Verity still being alive, and of Lowen being the dark phoenix, because we liked it and it was really, really cool," he said. "It was this amazing moment of, Holy crap! Has Lowen been the mastermind the whole time? It was the ending we always thought we were gonna do and it was what we had planned on. So, not showing her put the glasses on was such a massive revelation to realize."

The director and the studio ran focus group screenings mixing readers of Hoover's novel with newcomers, and kept hearing the same thing. Showalter said the feedback was unusually specific: "what we figured out was, it's because they want Lowen to be in a place of uncertainty when the movie's over."

The problem, he explained, was complicity. "It took us a really long time to realize the audience isn't ready to make the kind of decision at the end of the movie that we had been giving Lowen," Showalter said. "Lowen had this moment where she put on the sunglasses and was like, I don't give a shit, and the audience wasn't ready to go there with her. The audience wanted her to be like, What the fuck have I done? We realized the audience is Lowen and the audience wasn't ready to put those glasses on."

Showalter took other liberties with the source material. He cut one of Verity's dead children — a change Hoover, who consulted on the film, called "the best change we could have made." The novelist approved of the final ending too. "I couldn't be happier," she told Variety. "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."

The film has divided critics sharply — one review called it "a flat-footed dud" — yet it is predicted to top the weekend box office, which would make it Hathaway's third No. 1 release this year. Whether the focus-group-tested ambiguity holds up against the "dark phoenix" finale Showalter abandoned may become the debate the film's afterlife deserves.