Anne Hathaway's Fifth Movie of 2026 Just Hit Theaters - and She's About to Vanish

Anne Hathaway has had the busiest year of any actor in Hollywood - and she is done being seen. Her new psychological thriller Verity opened in theaters on October 2, marking her fifth film release of 2026. Her plan for October 3? To, in her own words, "vanish in a plume of smoke."

The comment came during the Verity press tour, when Hathaway told Entertainment Tonight exactly how she intends to celebrate the end of her marathon year. "The movie comes out on Oct. 2, and Oct. 3, I'm going to vanish in a plume of smoke, and you're not gonna see me until you have to," she said. "I'm definitely gonna disappear and take some time off."

She has earned the break. Hathaway kicked off 2026 in April with Mother Mary, a small-scale drama in which she played a pop star trying to reconnect with an estranged former friend. Just weeks later, she slipped back into one of her most iconic roles, Andi Sachs, for The Devil Wears Prada 2 - a sequel that has become Disney's second-highest-grossing movie of the year, sitting behind only Toy Story 5. July brought Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, with Hathaway earning acclaim as Penelope in an epic that has become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time and the biggest film in Universal's history, surpassing The Dark Knight Rises as the biggest hit of both her and Nolan's careers. August delivered The End of Oak Street, David Robert Mitchell's sci-fi thriller. And now Verity caps the run: five films in nine months, spanning indie drama, blockbuster sequel, auteur epic, genre thriller, and a Colleen Hoover adaptation.

What Verity is about

Directed by Michael Showalter, Verity adapts Hoover's bestselling psychological thriller for Amazon MGM Studios. Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, a bestselling author incapacitated by a mysterious accident. Her husband Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett, hires struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh - played by Dakota Johnson - to complete Verity's unfinished book series. Installed in the Crawford home to work, Lowen discovers an unpublished manuscript packed with disturbing revelations about Verity, Jeremy, and their family, and the question of what is true curdles into something much darker.

The three leads walked the red carpet together at the film's New York premiere on September 29, where a visibly pregnant Hathaway - she is expecting her third child with husband Adam Shulman - spoke about the distance between her steady home life and the darkness of the material. Early reviews have been mixed, with critics praising the central trio's crackling chemistry while wishing the film leaned harder into its creepiest instincts.

For now, Verity is a theaters-only affair; the studio has not announced when it will be available to watch at home. Hathaway's disappearing act will not last forever either - she is scheduled to begin work on Days of Thunder 2 alongside Tom Cruise in March. But after a year in which she seemingly never left the screen, a few months of smoke sounds about right.