Nolte: Tom Cruise’s Climate Change Lecture ‘Digger’ DOA with $1.2M Thursday

Tom Cruise’s massively expensive Global Warming screed Digger is DOA at the box office after Thursday previews managed to attract only $1.2 million in box office revenue.

Between production and promotion costs, Warner Bros. sank about $250 million into this disaster. Digger is the creation of two-time Oscar winner González Iñárritu, who is known to have climbed up his own ass on more than one occasion in a quest for self-importance.

Far-left Variety reports:

In a twist that few might have predicted this time last year… Tom Cruise and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s R-rated environmental satire Digger … is shaping up to be one of the year’s biggest bombs, with opening weekend projections of $12 million to $15 million from 3,300 North American screens.

How bad is $1.2 million?

Oh, it’s bad.

Very bad.

Other wide release movies that opened to about the same amount on their Thursday nights all died at the box office. A few examples:

• The Creator (2023) scored a $1.6 million Thursday and opened to a pathetic $14.1 million.
• Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026) – $1.5 million/$13.5 million.
• Nobody 2 (2025) – $1.3 million/$9.25 million
• Wolf Man (2025) – $1.4 million/$10.8 million

With a $1.2 million opening, Digger is unlikely to hit even the $12 to $15 million opening Variety expects.

Additionally, none of those other weak openers starred Tom Cruise or anyone close to a Tom Cruise.

The last time Cruise had a wide release movie he starred in open below $12 million all the way back in 1992 with Far and Away.

As far as Thursday night previews, his worst is still 2017’s American Made (which is a good movie). It ended up with $6.2 million opening weekend, a total domestic gross of $52 million, and a worldwide gross of $135 million. I would be very surprised if Digger reaches $135 million worldwide or $50 million domestic.

Digger is firing off the same vibe as that Jennifer Lawrence 2017 catastrophe Mother!, Darren Aronofsky’s noisy tribute to Mother Nature that explores the horrors of modernity (that just happens to have delivered the greatest standard of living in human history). Mother! (which I hated) at least tried to tell its story through metaphor. Based on the reviews, Digger is so aggressively on-the-nose and in your face that it’s hard to believe.

Mother! opened on nearly 2,400 screens with $7.53 million. It went on to gross $44 million worldwide. It also received better reviews than Digger and cost about 1/6^th as much.

As I wrote earlier today, “All we really want is for movies to return to being entertaining, inspiring, and enlightening… And that movies stop shaming, lecturing, insulting, and trying to queer us.”

I’m not counting on it.