Digger Box Office Bomb Becomes Tom Cruise’s Biggest Career Flop

Tom Cruise spent months generating excitement for his latest film, but even his global star appeal could not prevent Digger from suffering a disappointing opening weekend at the box office.

The poorly reviewed satire earned only $8 million in US cinemas, while international ticket sales reached $12 million across 74 countries.

Those results are a major concern for a film that cost at least $125 million to produce. Some insiders put the production budget closer to $160 million, while a further $100 million is believed to have been spent on marketing and promotion.

Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Digger reportedly needs to generate about $350 million worldwide in cinemas to break even. Industry analysts currently expect the film to lose around $150 million, potentially making it one of the biggest box-office failures of Cruise’s 45-year career.

Cruise has experienced major commercial setbacks before. His 2007 political thriller Lions for Lambs flopped despite costing just $35 million, while his 2017 effort to revive The Mummy franchise reportedly lost $95 million.

By contrast, Verity, the psychological thriller adapted from Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel and led by Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, opened to $32.6 million over the same weekend. The result placed it comfortably at No. 1 at the box office.

Digger was even outperformed by Resident Evil, which had already been in cinemas for two weeks.

The weak opening came despite an extensive publicity campaign. Cruise gave his first magazine interview in years, made several television appearances and attended a London premiere with the Prince and Princess of Wales. However, the film’s reviews last week appeared to deliver an early blow to its box-office prospects.

The expensive black comedy had been presented as a potential awards contender for Cruise, who underwent a dramatic transformation to play an eccentric oil tycoon whose actions unknowingly trigger an environmental catastrophe.

Critics have been sharply divided. One review described the part as a bold departure for Cruise, whose career has long been associated with high-budget action blockbusters.

Our News Outlet’s Brian Viner was among those impressed, giving the film four stars. He wrote: “I’ve already seen Digger twice, and enjoyed it much more the second time, knowing the twists from the start.

“First time round, I felt it got tangled in its own conceit and artifice, becoming not just baffling but self-indulgent.

“Nonetheless, this is bold and often brilliant film-making, with deserved whispers of Oscar nominations for Iñárritu, Cruise and Goodman, and fabulous supporting performances from Ahmed, Sandra Hüller and Jesse Plemons, not to mention an animatronic cat.”

The BBC’s Nicholas Barber was another critic to praise the movie. In his four-star review, he wrote: “Personally, I loved it. Some of its excesses are, well, a bit too excessive, and most viewers will wish it was shorter.

“After about 90 minutes, you get tired of close-ups of Goodman yelling while snake-sized veins bulge out of his forehead.”

‘But when Cruise is clambering all over the set, delivering thunderous lectures on the oil industry, I couldn’t help grinning at the gargantuan scale of his performance, the conviction of the script’s grim environmental message, and Iñárritu’s antic style.’

In The Telegraph, Robbie Collin branded Digger ‘the most bonkers film of the year’, writing: ‘Digger itself exists in that perpetually uncertain state, and I’m not sure whether the debate it’s having with itself about art’s impotence in the face of catastrophe is one it can, or even wants to, resolve.

‘But what a thrill to watch Iñárritu and Cruise hash it out with so much beauty, daring and extravagance.’

However, many reviews were on the negative side, with The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw awarding the film just two stars.

He wrote: ‘As with Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, there may be a tacit consensus, understandable at some level, that at least we have a big mainstream movie which is talking about the biggest issue of our time, and we have a duty to suspend critical objection.

‘Digger certainly resonates with Donald Trump’s greedy urge to despoil the Arctic and everywhere else. Yet there is something glib and overblown here. This film finds itself in a postmodern hole. And what do you do when you’re in a hole?’

Kevin Maher in The Times went further, and gave the film just one star while writing: ‘There surely exists an alternate movie universe where Digger is played by an actual ”older” actor, say Dustin Hoffman or Ben Kingsley, and in that universe that film is certainly more effective than this one.

‘Cruise, instead, is in the unenviable position of being Digger’s sole selling point and its fatal flaw.’

In his two-star review, Empire’s Olly Richards wrote: ‘Digger is a bumptious blowhard… Cruise emerges with a win, reminding us how riveting he can be as an actor, not just as a movie star.

‘A role so oversized and absurd demands fearless commitment, which he certainly gives. The big swing is laudable. If only the film were more rewarding.’

Writing in Variety, Owen Gleiberman said: ‘I’m not sure that “Digger” is going to connect, because it’s so full of itself – so top-heavy with importance.

‘The movie cost north of $125 million to make, and that figure is not only too big to probably justify itself; it’s a testament to the arrogance of the filmmakers – to the assumption that we’ll turn out in droves for this ponderous absurdist lecture.’

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant), Digger follows the world’s most powerful man, eccentric oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (played by Cruise), as he races to fix a catastrophic ecological disaster that he himself unleashed.

The film co-stars John Goodman as the dictatorial President of the United States.

Digger is one of the few awards-focused movies that Cruise has starred in for almost three decades and is directed by four-time Oscar winner Alejandro, who is known for his work on Birdman and The Revenant.