In a twist that surprised absolutely no one who has ever watched a Hollywood budget spiral out of control, Tom Cruise's latest epic, *Digger*, has gone from glitzy premiere to cautionary tale faster than you can say "box office bomb." The film, which had its world premiere in London four weeks ago complete with a literal fanfare from the Band of the Irish Guards, has become a spectacular flop, projected to lose a staggering $245 million.
The premiere itself was a star-studded affair, with the Prince and Princess of Wales (William in a velvet tux, Kate in a chiffon gown and Princess Diana's earrings) joining Cruise (Armani) and a retinue of co-stars including Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Loyal courtiers like Salma Hayek, Hannah Waddingham, and three Beckhams (David, Cruz, and Romeo) filled the front rows. The film started two hours late due to Cruise's trademark red-carpet completism, but no one minded - after all, this is the man who "saved Hollywood's ass" with *Top Gun: Maverick*. By 11pm, however, the mood had shifted from adoration to disquiet. Applause was mixed with murmurings and a rush for the exits. The hottest ticket in town, it turned out, was a stone-cold turkey.
The numbers are brutal. *Digger* opened to a mere $8 million in the US, dropping 60% in its second weekend. Internationally, it fared even worse: $12 million across 74 territories, averaging just $6,100 per country. To date, it has made $37.7 million, with estimates suggesting a final haul of $50 million. But its costs? Originally budgeted at $125 million, the six-month shoot spiraled to about $175 million, with another $100 million spent on marketing. Given that cinemas keep about half of ticket revenue, the film would need to make $350 million to break even (though Warner Bros. optimistically puts the number at $300 million). Complicating matters further is Cruise's "first-dollar" deal, which diverts initial takings straight to him rather than the studio.
With a predicted $245 million loss, *Digger* has earned a place alongside the most costly flops of all time: 1995's *Cutthroat Island* ($222 million loss, adjusted for inflation), 2018's *Mortal Engines* ($224 million adjusted), and *The Marvels* (estimated adjusted losses between $205 million and $250 million). In some sense, *Digger* has already performed worse than all three. Pre-release, no one had high hopes for any of them - yet they still managed to make at least double what *Digger* is expected to. But *Digger* is unique: an unprecedented folly of misjudgment, bad timing, and spectacular hubris.
To understand how this happened, we must go back to the film's roots. The idea for its central character - a boorish billionaire oil magnate whose drilling in the Arctic triggers eco-catastrophe - came to director Alejandro González Iñárritu in 2015 while working on *The Revenant*. That film, another expensive ($165 million) epic, won Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar and Iñárritu a best director statuette, making him the third person ever to win consecutive directing Oscars (after *Birdman* in 2014). Iñárritu has said he didn't pursue *Digger* for a while because he "wasn't looking for a story" (ominous words, in hindsight). After *The Revenant*'s success, he began developing the concept with Netflix as a vehicle for DiCaprio, under the working title *Blah, Blah, Blah* (ominous klaxon #2). Then someone at the streamer noticed they already had a pricey eco-dramedy with DiCaprio in the works - Adam McKay's *Don't Look Up* - and *Digger* was ditched. So Iñárritu busied himself with *Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths*: an almost three-hour, black-and-white, existential semi-autobiographical vanity project that few saw and fewer liked.
Meanwhile, Cruise, glowing from his recent canonization as the savior of cinema, was looking to broaden his portfolio beyond action franchises. Perhaps recalling his fat-suited cameo as repellant studio head Les Grossman in *Tropic Thunder*, he reached out to Iñárritu, and they began work in 2022. The shoot began in late 2024, on 35mm, filmed in Vista Vision - which is, for the avoidance of doubt, magnificently expensive.
This time last year, the film was in post-production, and Cruise was in Los Angeles receiving an honorary Oscar - his first ever Academy Award. His emotional speech detailed a lifetime devoted to the craft. "Making films is not what I do, it is who I am," he told the crowd. The man to give him the statuette? Iñárritu. The auguries were obvious: if ever a movie were to win Cruise his first Oscar proper, this would be the man who'd hand it to him.
Did anyone notice during production that *Digger* was awful? Or that sufficient numbers of people were likely to loathe it? If so, they were either cowed or buoyed by the confidence of the two men at its helm. Plus, says Steven Gaydos, former executive editor of *Variety*, for the past decade or so, this kind of reckless endeavor has been standard industry practice: "*Digger* is just the latest Hollywood supertanker art film to go down." He tracks the origins of that trend to the pre-pandemic eagerness of streamers to write blank checks for directors who might confer credibility on them. Auteurs were swift to sign up, but the lack of oversight or guardrails - exactly the terms which sweetened the deal - meant their movies often pleased only themselves.
Sometimes the strategy (since binned at Netflix) sort of worked. Neither Alfonso Cuarón's *Roma* nor Noah Baumbach's *Marriage Story*, Jane Campion's *The Power of the Dog* or David Fincher's *Mank* secured Netflix that coveted best picture Oscar, but they came pretty close. Often, it was more obviously unsuccessful. Gaydos highlights the $175 million Netflix sunk into Martin Scorsese's *The Irishman* in 2019, and then the $200 million Apple handed him in 2022 for *Killers of the Flower Moon*. "Again," says Gaydos, "beaucoup Oscar nominations, no wins".
Meanwhile traditional studios, spooked by streamers' dominance, copied the playbook - including the fallout. After awards glory with *Whiplash* and *La La Land*, Damien Chazelle saddled Paramount with *Babylon*: a critical flop which, says Gaydos, "missed recoupment by $135m". After sweeping the Oscars with *Parasite*, Bong Joon-ho's *Mickey 17* repeated the trick at Warner Bros, sinking $200 million.
That studio's form with the Hollywood supertanker art film isn't all bad: last year they lost $150 million on another VistaVision whopper, but at least Paul Thomas Anderson's *One Battle After Another* won them lots of Oscars, including best picture. And at that stage Warners could sustain the hit, coffers swamped from the likes of *Sinners*, *The Minecraft Movie* and *F1*. This time round, there was no blockbuster safety net - hence, says Gaydos, "this supertanker might have sunk the studio's chiefs Michael de Luca and Pam Abdy." The final release from the studio before its Paramount Skydance takeover was such an unqualified calamity that the first move of incoming owner David Ellison was to axe both of them. Pre-merger, many had voiced concern about the sorts of projects that might be greenlit by the new super-studio. Now they know: Ellison's appetite for new ideas and original IP will have been diminished yet further. "Overspending on art has never been a winning strategy in Hollywood," says Gaydos. "But no one's ever seen the scale of these recent maydays and the oceans of red ink the supertanker art films have left in their wake."
Of all the injured parties emerging from the wreckage of *Digger* - save perhaps for De Luca and Abdy - Cruise is the most mortally wounded. He's had misfires before: 2017's *The Mummy* lost $95 million, but still grossed over $400 million. The only conclusions to be drawn will be chastening for a man who would have assumed he was appreciated as much as an artist as a preternaturally-youthful pensioner with a fierce commitment to near-fatal stunts and taking his top off. Yet clearly, it seems, people do not go to a Tom Cruise movie to see him act. They go to see a movie star. Yes, he sported prosthetics in *Tropic Thunder*, but you could still see the man beneath the mask, and he wasn't in it for long anyway. In *Digger*, so thick are the layers of rubber it might as well be anyone beneath them.
Aside from riding a motorbike off a cliff, Cruise's fans do not want him to take risks, nor to indulge in the level of belligerent insanity both he and his character display here, which serves as an uncomfortable reminder of the Oprah sofa-jumping years. They also want him to be the good guy. In *Top Gun* and, especially, *Mission: Impossible*, he's a quasi-Messiah: the only man able to save the world. In *Digger*, he plays the only man able to destroy it. That's the opposite of what Cruise's fanbase wants.
Yet beyond Cruise's usual acolytes, there are plenty of people who might well have been keen to see *Digger* if they'd known what it really was: an ambitious, meta-textual liberal satire that seeks to address collective culpability for ecological collapse. Unfortunately all of the promotion for the film has sought to suppress this - in part because explaining how necessitates revealing a major plot spoiler. Instead, the push focused on its star's transformation, on teases and reveals of Digger's colossal tum and obnoxious hectoring. So confident were the makers of *Digger* in their film's pre-sold allure they forgot to actually sell it.
By the time the reviews were out, the marketing had no choice but to scramble. A new campaign was launched quoting both negative and positive reviews, before urging audiences to ignore the critics and judge for themselves. Retrospectively positioning a movie's divisiveness as intentional isn't necessarily a bad plan. But the strategy inevitably recalled that taken by Francis Ford Coppola's $125 million disaster *Megalopolis* in 2024 - which further self-sabotaged by attributing made-up quotes to real-life critics. This was an unhappy association and within days, *Digger*'s ads pivoted again, suddenly telling punters they should take note of the critics after all, because although US reviewers were iffy, the French really liked it.
By then, the muddle didn't matter. Only the morbidly curious could be tempted to the cinema. Word of mouth did its own work, too: *Digger*'s CinemaScore (which records exiting audience reaction on US opening night) was C+. That's considerably less than the new *Paw Patrol* movie (A) and worse even than new Mark Zuckerberg drama *The Social Reckoning* (B+) - whose own duff box office further suggests people aren't automatically eager to spend their weekends gazing at supersized billionaires.