Tom Cruise has spent four decades playing heroes who save the world, and audiences have happily paid to watch him do it. But when the mission shifts from stopping global catastrophe to causing one, the ticket-buying public apparently decided to stay home. Digger, Cruise's new comedy-drama from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, landed in theaters on September 28, and by the October 6 numbers, the film had settled into genuinely dire territory. The premise - the most powerful man on Earth scrambling to prove he's humanity's savior before the disaster he set in motion wipes everything out - was never going to be a light sell. It turns out it was an even harder sell than anyone anticipated.
A Strange Fit for an Even Stranger Fall Movie Season
On paper, the pairing of Cruise and Iñárritu reads like a fever dream in the best way. The man who runs across rooftops for a living, directed by the man behind Birdman and The Revenant? That's either awards bait or a spectacular misfire, and Digger seems to have landed somewhere closer to the latter. The film runs 129 minutes - long for a comedy, roughly standard for a prestige drama - and carries a 7.531/10 rating on TMDb, which tells a specific story: people who saw it generally liked it, but not enough people saw it. A respectable user score with weak attendance is the classic signature of a movie that critics and cinephiles admire while general audiences shrug.
The release date didn't do the film any favors either. A late-September slot can work for serious awards contenders, but Digger is neither a straightforward Oscar play nor a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. It's a tonal hybrid - comedy and drama in the same package - and that's a genre blender that consistently confuses marketing departments. Do you sell the laughs? The apocalypse? Tom Cruise doing something weird? Trailers that can't answer that question tend to produce opening weekends that can't answer it either.
A Supporting Cast That Deserved a Bigger Audience
Here's the frustrating part: look at this ensemble. Riz Ahmed as Ganesh. John Goodman as President Compson. Sandra Hüller as Emma - the Anatomy of a Fall and Zone of Interest star, still one of the most electrifying actors working anywhere. Michael Stuhlbarg as the Vice President. Jesse Plemons as someone named Kenny, which is already perfect. Emma D'Arcy as Lina. Robert John Burke as General Fitzgerald.
That's a murderer's row of character actors and critical darlings. On a different movie, a cast like this generates weeks of buzzy profiles and podcast deep dives. On Digger, it feels like Hollywood threw an incredible dinner party and forgot to send out the invitations.
Cruise, for his part, plays Rockwell, a role that asks him to channel the megalomania he usually fights against rather than embodies. It's a real swing - the kind of against-type move that can define a late-career chapter if it connects. Whether it's the material, the marketing, or simply a public that wants its Tom Cruise sprinting toward danger instead of causing it, the swing whiffed with moviegoers.
What This Means for Everyone Involved
For Iñárritu, this is a stumble from a filmmaker who has rarely had one. For Cruise, it's a reminder that his drawing power is most reliable when he's flying jets or jumping off things - a lesson the industry has learned and forgotten a dozen times. For the supporting cast, it's a blip; every one of them has a full dance card.
The bigger question is what Digger becomes from here. A 7.5-ish user rating suggests the film has defenders, and a movie this strange and this well-acted often finds a second life on streaming, where curiosity clicks are cheap and the pressure of a theatrical opening weekend disappears. Plenty of films that died in theaters became beloved in living rooms.
So no, Digger didn't dig up an audience. But before writing it off entirely, remember: the people who did show up seem to have found something worth watching. Sometimes the box office gets it wrong. Sometimes it just gets there late - two years from now, on a streaming platform, with a much friendlier crowd.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
