The digger disaster: What an epic movie means for Tom Cruise and Hollywood
The unprecedented folly of misjudgment, bad timing, and spectacular arrogance is projected to lose $245 million. How did this happen? The buzz at Digger's world premiere in London four weeks ago was real. As the Prince and Princess of Wales took to the stage, their entrance was heralded by the Irish Guards' marching band - swags bright, headscarves gleaming, bearskin hats fluttering under the lights. According to this Manas
The buzz at Digger's world premiere in London four weeks ago was real. As the Prince and Princess of Wales took to the stage, their entrance was heralded by the Irish Guards' marching band - swags bright, headscarves gleaming, bearskin hats fluttering under the lights.
For the occasion, the group was not overdressed. Tom Cruise (Armani) has the longest reign of cinema with William (velvet tux) and Kate (chiffon dress, Princess Diana earrings) to introduce the film with an ensemble including director Alejandro González Iñárritu and actors Sandra, Janbarg Ahmed, Michael Holler, Michael Holler and Michael Stivers. Loyal courtiers filled the front rows: Salma Hayek, Hannah Waddingham and no fewer than three Beckhams (David, Cruz and Romeo).
The movie itself started two hours late, thanks to Cruise's trademark red-carpet selfies and autographs. But no one cared, much less if someone had earned the right to keep 800 people waiting with increased babysitter fees and they lost all feeling in their feet. Surely that movie star remains impenetrable, that smiling, irresistible enigma, the man who "saved Hollywood's ass" when Top Gun: Maverick lured people back to the multiplex after two years.
At 11:00 p.m., when the lights were turned on, the mood was different. There was discomfort. Cheers, too, of course, but whispers and rushes for an exit that's only gently tickled by pins and needles. Could it be that the hottest ticket was actually a stone cold turkey?
The world premiere was the culmination of Digger's theatrical run. When the film opened worldwide a week later, to near-horrendous global reviews, the box office was terrible — and it went downhill from there. Digger earned $8 million in its first weekend in the US, before falling 60% in its second week. Its international opening was worse: $12 million in 74 territories, an average of $6.1K per country. It has earned 37.7 million dollars so far. Estimates suggest that the final purchase is $50 million.
Its costs were higher. Its initial budget was 125 million dollars, the six-month filming production reached about 175 million dollars. Another $100 million was spent on marketing. With theaters keeping about half of the ticket revenue, it looks like the film will need to make $350 million to break even (though Warner Bros. puts the number closer to $300 million). Those numbers are further complicated by Cruise's "first dollar" deal, meaning first impressions go directly to him, not the studio.
Digger's projected $245 million loss catapults it gently into the upper echelons of the highest-grossing flops of all time, alongside 1995's swashbuckler Cutthroat Island ($222 million, inflation-adjusted loss), 2018's steampunk dud Mortal Engines ($224 million) and estimated adjusted losses of $205 million to $250 million. is Somehow, Digger has already performed worse than all three. None of them had high hopes before release - yet they still managed to make at least double what they were expecting. No one predicted that Cattrate Island would change our ideas about what great swing humor could be. Or that Hugo Weaving's turn in Mortal Engines will make him an Oscar winner. But the other is unique: unprecedented stupidity of misjudgment, bad timing and spectacular arrogance.
To dig out another fatal flaw, it pays to go back to its roots. The idea for its main character—a wealthy oil billionaire whose Arctic drilling causes an environmental disaster—came to Iñárritu, the Mexican filmmaker who broke through with 2015's Amores Prussia. Then, he was busy working on The Revenant - an expensive ($165 million) take on that epic, epic-centric game. Playing a fugitive frontiersman, DiCaprio crossed a frozen river, ate raw bison liver, crawled into a horse carcass — and rightfully won an Academy Award. At the same ceremony, Iñárritu also won the award for best director, becoming the third person to do so in consecutive years.
Iñárritu has said that he didn't follow Daiger for a while because, despite developing an obsession with the character, he "wasn't looking for the story" (sinister words, in retrospect). But after the success of The Revenant, he began developing the concept with Netflix as a vehicle for DiCaprio, under the working title Blah, Blah, Blah (Ominous Klaxon #2). Then a streamer realized they already had an expensive Leonardo DiCaprio eco-drama in the form of Adam McKay's Don't Look Up — the flop of which would complete a quick hat trick of bad luck — and it was dropped. So Iñárritu instead busied himself with Bardo, the false chronicle of a fistful of truth: a nearly three-hour, black-and-white, existential semi-autonomous project of the kind that the latest gilded directors aspire to make happen. Few people saw it, few liked it.
Meanwhile, Cruise, basked in his recent sainthood as the savior of cinema, was looking for films to expand his portfolio beyond action franchises like Top Gun and Mission: Impossible. Perhaps reminded of the horror he encountered in Tropic Thunder as repulsive studio head Les Grossman, Iñárritu began their career in 2022. Filming began in late 2024, on 35mm, and was shot on Vista Vision - which, for the avoidance of doubt, is very expensive.
This time last year, the film was in post-production and Cruise was in Los Angeles receiving an honorary Academy Award - his first. His emotional speech described a lifetime dedicated to the industry. "Filmmaking isn't what I do, it's who I am," he told the crowd. The man to give him the statue? Iñárritu's omens were clear: if a movie was going to bring Cruise his first Oscar, this was the man to give it to him.
Did anyone notice during production that Digger was awful? Or that enough people are likely to hate the movie that it will be a disaster? If that was the case, the confidence of the two men at the top of it would either make them fat or eat them. Plus, former Variety editor Steven Giddos says that for the past decade or so, this kind of reckless endeavor has been standard industry practice: "The Driller is the last Hollywood supertanker art movie to go away."
Sometimes this strategy (since it was on Netflix) kind of worked. Neither Alfonso Cuarón's "Rome" nor Noah Baumbach's "Marriage Story," Jane Campion's "Dog Power" or David Fincher's "Monk" could secure Netflix's best-picture Oscar, but they came very close. More often than not, it failed miserably. Guidos highlights the $175 million Netflix sunk into Martin Scorsese's The Irishman in 2019, followed by Apple's $200 million in 2022 for Killers of the Flower Moon. "Again, Oscar nominees, no wins," says Gaydos.
Meanwhile, traditional studios, fearful of the dominance of streamers, copied the playbook — including the results. After winning awards with Whiplash and La La Land, Damien Chazelle graced Paramount with Babylon: a critical flop that, according to Gaydos, "missed a $135 million refund." After sweeping the Oscars with Parasite, Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 repeated the trick at Warner Bros., sinking $200 million.
That studio's shape isn't bad with Hollywood blockbuster art: last year they lost $150 million. In another fantastic VistaVision, but at least one battle after another, Paul Thomas Anderson won them plenty of Oscars, including Best Picture. And at that point, Warners could keep the hit, the coffers were filled with the likes of Sinners, The Minecraft Movie and F1.
This time, there was no blockbuster safety net—hence, Guidos says, "the supertanker might have sunk studio heads Michael De Luca and Pam Abdi." The final release from the studio before Paramount took over Skydance was such a disaster that new owner David Ellison's first move was to fire them both.
Prior to the merger, many had expressed concern about the types of projects that the new super studio might light up. Now they know: Ellison's appetite for new ideas and original IP has waned even less. "Overspending on art has never been a winning strategy in Hollywood," says Gaydos. "But no one has ever seen the extent of these recent days and the oceans of red ink that supertanker art films have left behind."
Of all the injured people emerging from the other wreckage—except for De Luca and Abdi—Cruz has the most fatal injuries. He's had mistakes before: 2017's The Mummy lost $95 million, but still grossed more than $400 million. The only conclusion that can be drawn is a chastening one for a man who thought he was as much appreciated as an artist as a young pensioner with a fierce commitment to near-fatal stunts and taking the top spot. Off.
However, clearly, it seems, people don't go to a Tom Cruise movie to see him act. They go to see a movie star. Yes, he wore prosthetics in Tropic Thunder, but you could still see the man under the mask, and he wasn't in it long anyway. On the Digger, the rubber layers are so thick that anyone could be under them.
Aside from the motorcycle ride off the cliff, Cruise fans don't want him to take risks or indulge in his character's level of belligerent madness here, which is reminiscent of Oprah's couch-jumping years. They also want him to be a good man. In Top Gun and especially Mission: Impossible, he is a quasi-messiah: the only man who can save the world. In Digger, he plays the only man who can destroy it. This is the opposite of what Cruise fans want.
Beyond Cruise's usual partners, though, there's plenty of people who'd want to see it again if they knew what it really was: an ambitious, hypertextual liberal satire that seeks to address collective guilt for environmental collapse. Unfortunately, all of the film's publicity has sought to suppress this - in part because it explains how it necessitates revealing a major plot spoiler.
Instead, the push focused on his star's transformation, on the innuendos and sad revelations, and the onslaught of other obnoxiousness. The makers of Digger were so confident in the pre-sold appeal of their film that they forgot to actually sell it.
As the reviews rolled out, marketing had no choice but to scramble. A new campaign was launched that quoted both negative and positive reviews and asked audiences to ignore the critics and judge for themselves. Putting intentional divisiveness into a movie isn't necessarily a bad idea. But the strategy is inevitably reminiscent of that adopted in Francis Ford Coppola's $125 million disaster Megalopolis 2024 — which further undermined itself by attributing fictitious quotes to real critics. It was an unpleasant association, and within days another ad was rolling again, suddenly telling players that they should pay attention to the critics after all, because although the American critics were skeptical, the French really loved it.
Until then, the mess didn't matter. Only the morbidly curious could be tempted to the cinema. Word of mouth also worked: Digger's CinemaScore (which records audience reaction on opening night in the US) was a C+. That's significantly less than the new Paw Patrol movie (A) and even worse than Mark Zuckerberg's new drama The Social Reckoning (B+) — whose box office Duff itself suggests people aren't automatically eager to spend their weekends staring at mega-billionaires doing terrible things.
Cruise may still campaign cautiously for an Oscar nomination — the cost of doing so will be small change compared to the losses he's already incurred. In a year of standout performances from the likes of Andrew Scott (Elsinore) and John Malkovich (Nine Wild Horse), victory is impossible, yet Cruise and his co-stars might calculate that some such acknowledgment from his peers might help soften the blow — and justify everyone's decision.
And indeed, there are early signs that the scale of the Digger disaster may be working in its favor. After all, this isn't some bardish damp squib that's meant to be a footnote in a book no one will ever read. This is a film whose title is synonymous with tragic stupidity. An apparently grassroots lobby is building a convincing case that Digger is a cult classic in the making. Celebrities have put their heads above the parapet to defend it – and not just fans like Anne Hathaway, who is set to star with Cruise in the upcoming Days of Thunder sequel, who gave it a 10/10 on Letterboxd, or Glenn Powell – who Cruise directed in Top Gun: Maverick – and who called it cinematic.
Jane Fonda long praised the film on Instagram, calling Cruise "very good and very brave." "Bold, bold and sophisticated cinematography" in Guillermo del Toro. Neil Young called it "the best movie I've ever seen". Meanwhile, plans to commemorate its world premiere - still less than a month ago - are already fetching significant sums on eBay. It seems that the digger is unlikely to be buried forever.