Josh Weiner
Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
Tom Cruise’s latest film, “Digger,” collapsed at the box office this weekend, opening to just $8 million across 3,321 North American theaters, the weakest domestic debut of his career since 2007’s “Lions for Lambs,” which opened to $6.7 million.
The numbers are especially brutal against the film’s reported $160 to $180 million production budget. Even in the best-case scenario of reaching $50 million worldwide, “Digger” is projected to lose around $150 million, putting it in contention for one of the biggest box office bombs of the year, if not of all time. The film landed in fifth place for the weekend, well behind the Anne Hathaway-led “Verity,” which debuted to $32.6 million and claimed the No. 1 spot.
Directed by two-time Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu, “Digger” turned out to be a far stranger film than its marketing suggested. Billed loosely as a “comedy of catastrophic proportions,” the movie follows Digger Rockwell, a billionaire oil tycoon played by Cruise whose company triggers a glacier-cracking environmental disaster, then scrambles to spin the crisis as proof he’s humanity’s savior even as the fallout threatens millions of lives and up to $18 trillion in damage. The film reportedly contains a meta structural twist: what audiences initially take for a straightforward disaster story is revealed to actually be a play about the disaster, staged within a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world shaped by its aftermath, a sharp tonal left turn from the marketing that sold it as more conventional star-driven spectacle.
The timing makes the loss sting even more for Warner Bros. “Digger” marks Cruise’s first film since signing a deal in January to develop and produce theatrical films with Warner Bros. Discovery, with studio chief David Zaslav having pushed hard to land Cruise in the wake of “Top Gun: Maverick.” It’s also the final film Warner Bros. releases before its merger with Paramount closes, with the combined studio set to operate under the Skydance name going forward, meaning Cruise’s big-budget bet ends up as a parting disappointment rather than a triumphant send-off for the studio in its current form.
