"Digger" is starting to embrace the bad press. ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection How low will “Digger” go?
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film “Digger” — starring an unrecognizable Tom Cruise — is tracking to open as low as $8 million to $12 million this weekend, while reviewers have savaged the film and pundits quietly removed it from their Oscar prediction lists.
Previous tracking put the number around $30 million, then $20 million. Those figures were already considered worrisome.
Things look so dire that the movie is now shifting gears to embrace the bad press.
Warner Bros. rushed out a video on X urging audiences, “Decide for yourself.”
The promo starts off with a quote from a freelance movie influencer with just 4,895 TikTok followers who says, “‘Digger’ is an ambitious film sure to polarize audiences.” The clip then cuts to Cruise’s billionaire oil baron character bellowing: “You know what? F–k those people!”
Yesterday morning, the review embargo lifted on “Digger,” and the majority of top (actual) critics — and not the influencers who attended that weird Cruise event on the Warner Bros. lot in July — savaged the $135 million (or more) apocalyptic satire that had once been envisioned as Cruise’s prosthetically covered ticket to the elusive Best Actor Oscar.
The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney showed no mercy, writing that the film is “so meta that you watch in excruciating weariness as it disappears up its own ass and then realize to your dismay that there’s another eardrum-shattering hour left to endure.”
The Post’s Johnny Oleksinski gave the Warner Bros. misfire a rare zero stars, something he hasn’t done since “The Bride” (also Warners). And The Boston Globe called the film, “the worst movie of Tom Cruise’s career,” and also gave it a zero.
The fact the film has a (still dismal) 53% RottenTomatoes score (likely bolstered by influencers) obscures just how poorly it was received.
None of this comes as a shock around town where industry watchers have been noting the “Ishtar”/”Waterworld” parallels for some time, given the sky-high budget of “Digger” coupled with low box-office tracking.
On Sunday, Cruise and Iñárritu sat for an industry Q&A after a Producers Guild of America sneak peek, and the hometown crowd was gobsmacked by just how audaciously bad the film played. “You could feel the air drop out of the room,” one veteran producer told us. “It literally comes down to nobody read the script.”
The script contains a third-act twist (which we won’t spoil) that is simply perplexing, we hear, as well as two top-secret characters who co-star with Cruise that are also being kept under wraps. But sources tell us that protecting all those spoilers has made the project difficult to market. (There were even online theories that the movie was a musical, which was later debunked.)
The opening weekend’s receipts are looking grim for Warner Bros., which has had a dismal 2026 so far with disasters including “The Bride” and “Supergirl.”
According to Boxoffice Pro’s Daniel Loria, “Digger” could open at a “modest” No. 5 at the box office this weekend, earning a projected $8 million to $12 million. “That’s on par with where we’re tracking a number of other holdovers from last weekend, so it could finish somewhere between second and fifth on the weekend chart,” Loria says.
By comparison, Amazon MGM’s psychological thriller “Verity” based on a Colleen Hoover novel is tracking much higher, “with potential to creep above the $30 million mark over its opening weekend,” Loria adds.
But Loria says Cruise shouldn’t get the blame for the low “Digger” returns. “Tom Cruise is headlining the marketing campaign — but it’s unfair to compare a film of this nature to his big action tentpoles. This is more in line with Iñárritu’s ‘Birdman’ — irreverent and divisive for critics and audiences alike — and we expect a performance more in line with a specialty release than a crowd-pleaser.”
Then again, Iñárritu’s “Birdman” — which won a best picture Oscar as a left-field choice in 2015 — cost $18 million.
“Digger” is an impending disaster simply because of its budget, greenlit by Warner Bros. film heads Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy — but more importantly sanctioned by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the movie is an art house movie,” says the producer from that PGA screening. “So, at $30 million, you say, ‘OK, Alejandro. You want to have a movie that’s talking about the end of the world?'”
Alas, the movie will mark the end for Warner Bros. as a stand-alone studio. Within days, it’ll become part of the Paramount merger.
Says another dazed “Digger” viewer who attended the PGA event: “The irony is that the movie stars David Ellison’s most viable movie star that he has worked with consistently [on the ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Mission: Impossible’ franchises]. They’ve made millions of dollars together. He bought the company with his biggest star that is going to lose millions of dollars.”
Reflecting De Luca and Abdy’s artsy inclinations, an alternate poster for the film created by the blue-chip LA artist Ed Ruscha doesn’t even feature Cruise, but simply an iceberg with the words, “A man. A plan. A meltdown.” How fitting.
