Digger Is Officially the Flop of the Year

Digger has been lowered in its casket and buried at the box office. Over its opening weekend in theaters, the Tom Cruise–laden–in–latex climate-change comedy took in a paltry $8 million in torn tickets domestically, excavating the lowest end of already abysmal prerelease “tracking” estimates to arrive as the year’s biggest flop. Debuting on over 3,000 North American screens, the critically lambasted satire has basically no chance of breaking even and could lose as much as $150 million overall. Its distributor, Warner Bros., says the Alejandro González Iñárritu–directed exercise in movie magniloquence cost $125 million to produce, but inside sources put that budgetary figure more in the range of $160 million to $180 million with another $125 million-ish spent on a lavish marketing campaign befitting its A+-list star. And with audiences giving Digger a C on the exit poll Cinemascore (for which anything below a B usually spells disaster), word of mouth will only further curtail its prospects of striking box-office gold.

By contrast, Exhibitor Relations Co. senior media analyst Jeff Bock notes that Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014) was made with considerably more financial discipline, costing a mere $18 million en route to a Best Picture Oscar and a cumulative gross of $103.2 million. “Warner Bros. spent blockbuster money on what is essentially an art-house film,” Bock says of Digger. “But even Tom Cruise can’t transform this structurally chaotic satire into a four-quadrant event. The studio financed it on pedigree. That’s where most of these passion projects run into trouble — you’re spending too much money and you’re not looking at the actual film itself.”

Digger arrives as the capstone to a calamitous box-office year for Warner Bros that culminated Friday with the unceremonious firing of the studio’s co-chairpersons, Pam Abdy and Mike DeLuca (just as Skydance’s debt-laden $111 billion takeover of WB is finally set to go through Tuesday). On the heels of a triumphant 2025, during which the tandem CEOs pumped out blockbusters and dominated cultural conversation thanks to the movies they green-ligt, including Sinners, Weapons, and One Battle After Another, DeLuca and Abdy’s “big swing” approach yielded a string of underperformers. Among their 2026 duds: the Amblin-esque dinosaur caper The End of Oak Street and director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s punk-rock Bride of Frankenstein reimagining The Bride!, which is projected to end up losing as much as $90 million for Warner Bros.

According to a studio insider, when it came to Digger, Abdy and DeLuca observed a calculus established by One Battle After Another, which similarly harnessed the synergy between an Oscar-anointed auteur (Paul Thomas Anderson) and an A-list star (Leonardo DiCaprio), utilizing an early awards-season drop date to maximize its Academy Award potential. However, this time, it was to disastrous effect. “Mike and Pam are in the gambling business,” this insider says. “Tom Cruise is a top-three actor. But the [Digger] script is nonsensical. They’re like, Fuck it. Let’s go! We’re doing it.”

Bowing to a no bueno $12 million in 73 international territories (where foreign critics have been generally kinder to Iñárritu’s art-house aspirations), Digger also stands as the lowest opening for a Cruise movie since 2007’s far less expensive ensemble drama Lions for Lambs. Easy enough, then, to view Digger’s seven-figure opening as a kind of referendum on the Top Gun screen icon’s continuing power as a box-office draw. But in the view of Daniel Loria, editorial director of Boxoffice Pro, modern audiences who only know Cruise as the living embodiment of action moviedom — the ageless maniac who rides his motorcycle off a cliff and rappels down Dubai’s Burj Khalifa — are missing crucial context around his actorly intentions. Over a 45-year career, the 64-year-old has delivered nuanced character performances for such cinematically sainted directors as Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and Steven Spielberg. Moreover, in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky and, most impressionistically, as the hip-hop-dancing showbiz mogul Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, Cruise rendered himself unrecognizable beneath layers of prosthetic makeup. Understood in that way, his scenery-chewing, “Fuck those people!”–sputtering turn as oil tycoon Digger Rockwell can hardly be viewed as off-brand.

“This wasn’t going to be a Tom Cruise vehicle,” Loria says. “This is an Iñárritu film starring Tom Cruise. If you look at his choices, he’s always been very good about balancing between being a popcorn-movie star and challenging films. He’s in a wheelchair for Oliver Stone. He plays a very vulgar, contemporary character in Magnolia. In Eyes Wide Shut, he’s walking around trying to cheat on his wife. And he takes these swings for filmmakers. He doesn’t take them for his persona. He’s like, I want to make an interesting movie with an interesting director.”

Outside its standing as Abdy and DeLuca’s swan song, Digger could well be the last movie of its kind for the foreseeable future. I ask Bock what message the movie’s failure sends to Hollywood. “It says, ‘Appropriately budget your films,’” he responds. “Don’t risk your studio on a film like this. Just the genre in itself — a dark political comedy — should not cost any more than $40 million or $50 million. This just got out of control. Iñárritu and Cruise were like, Oh, you love me? I love you! Warner Bros. is giving us $150 million. Let’s go all out!”

“Tell me who green-lights a movie like this now,” he continues. “If you look at the studio landscape, I don’t even know. Maybe Universal. But they’re a lot tighter with how they budget films. So Warner Bros. was kind of the last bastion of auteur glory. And now Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy are gone.”