Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | October 6, 2026
After months of hype, Digger arrived in theatres to a disastrously low box-office opening weekend. Tom Cruise's return to "serious" cinema, courtesy of multi-Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, was a curiously marketed satire that hid its real plot from the trailers and relied largely on Cruise's status as "The Last Movie Star" to appeal to sceptical audiences. When that didn't work, the tepid reviews made things seem worse. And it all led to an $8 million opening gross in North America. It made a quarter of what the other major new release of the weekend, Verity, brought in, and earned about the same as Primetime, which is in its second week of release and playing in about 500 fewer cinemas.
Surely everyone knew a movie like this was doomed to fail, right? How did a weird, abrasive and exceedingly uncommercial film like this land a reported budget of $150 to 180 million? It would need, at minimum, a $400 million theatrical gross to break even. Some publications are predicting it could end its run at a $150 million loss, which would be the biggest of Cruise's career and one of the costliest in history. For context, The Flash reportedly had a loss of over $155 million.
There were a lot of factors at play that led to this major underperformance in cinemas. The trailers were vague and mostly dependent on eliciting goodwill from decades of other Cruise movies, none of which are in any way comparable to Digger. I've heard from some people that they found Cruise's intense press tour and lectures about timing his make-up team with a stopwatch put them off the movie. Post-review promo tried the old "judge for yourself" line, with the addition of some curiously snobby suggestions that those dang Americans just didn't appreciate the movie as well as European critics (this Scot hated it.)
It took no time at all for the "Digger is a flop" headlines to form, each with a sense of glee one usually reserves for when Trump gets his head stuck in his golf bag. It's been treated as a necessary humbling of Cruise or a symptom of Hollywood run amok. Digger was destined to fail and it did, so there's that. honestly, the discourse has been rather disheartening.
As I have mentioned before, I did not like Digger. Really, I was deeply irritated by the film. Granted, I am an Iñárritu skeptic who has never enjoyed his work and Digger exemplified all of the qualities in his narrative worldview that I find tedious and smarmy. For once, though, I was not alone among my fellow critics in disliking an Iñárritu film. Usually, I'm the outlier, yelling from the sidelines about how Birdman is less than meets the eye and The Revenant was well-shot self-flagellation disguised as important cinema. Now, though, I'm hardly unique. The reviews for Digger have been decidedly mixed, leaning more towards negative than positive. Even some of its defenders feel hesitant in their celebrations, talking up its ambition more than the execution.
I understand their predicament. We aren't exactly swimming in highly bold filmmaking with this sort of budget and A-List ensemble leading the way. On principle, rooting for the $150+ million high-wire act of meta-satire and anus cancer jokes is a solid stance to take. You want to encourage these kinds of go-for-broke experiments over yet another IP reboot or whitewashed biopic. Typically, I am a sucker for an overpriced vanity project wherein a major director gets nine figures to make something messy and uncommercial. I'm the person who loved Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! Hell, I'll put out a reasonably spirited defence for Joker: Folie a Deux. There's a thrill in seeing all that money on the screen for something that isn't wall-to-wall CGI or another superhero brawl in an airport hangar.
The promise of cinema used to be that directors and actors who had proven their money-making prowess would be allowed to make something more personal or challenging as a reward. Steven Spielberg made billions for investors so he can go off and do Munich. Steven Soderbergh makes a few Ocean's 11 and Magic Mike movies to get the backing for Bubble or Che. It was never a consistent or fairly applied system--only white dudes ever seemed to reap the benefits--but it was there all the same. Nowadays, it's all but disappeared. Even the Marvel directors don't seem to get a boost with their non-IP offerings. Unless you can make it for under $10 million (and that's still a mightily generous budget in indie circles), you're left in development hell.
The failure of Digger is not the end of cinema. I'm sure we'll still get films like it in the future. Still, it's hard to overlook the terminal decline of Hollywood and how the Ellison takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery will only exacerbate that. Thousands of people are going to lose their jobs over this crooked acquisition and among them will be the workers who actually care about the things they make. Getting rid of the producers who greenlit the two most highly acclaimed Warner Bros. films of 2026--Sinners and One Battle After Another--is a sign of Skydance's intent. The mid-budget film is all but dead, even for legendary directors with proven critical clout, and the blank check era may never return. We're all poorer for that.
It's not the job of audiences to act as the unpaid press agents to films they don't like because the smothering evils of corporate overrule are destroying everything we hold dear. This is one of the most frustrating parts about how we discuss Digger's flopping: all the responsibility suddenly falls upon the shoulders of fans and not executives. It's nigh-on impossible to sell a movie like this to the masses at the best of times, and saying, "Yeah, it's irritating and smarmy, but it's the principle of the thing, right?" does not work. And it shouldn't be the job of one film to stand tall as the exemplification of "real artists versus the system", especially when it's the bloody Birdman guy.
I dislike this version of pop culture discourse where casual viewers are encouraged to view art through a capitalistic lens, as though they were boardroom executives rather than regular fans. Why are so many people on social media nitpicking Rotten Tomatoes scores and budgets, like they're pernickety accountants whose jobs are on the line? It's the same problem I have with stans who obsess over Spotify streams and buying dozens of album variants to bolster their idol's Billboard numbers. What does that have to do with your enjoyment of the music? The pressure of consuming art in a monopolistic hellscape where audiences are blamed as "unsupportive" if an expensive risk fails is exhausting. A healthy cultural ecosystem should have room for everything, but that doesn't exist when four guys own everything and they're more interested in political grudges and AI slop.
If Digger gave us nothing else, its financial failure at least caused some embarrassment for David Zaslav before he left the Warner Bros. lot on fire. I'll take that.
