Tom Cruise has spent decades building a reputation as Hollywood's most forceful advocate for the theatrical experience. With Digger, that star power has collided with a much harsher force: the economics of a spectacular box-office failure. Yet as the film's commercial outlook worsens, a striking group of actors and directors is asking audiences to separate the work from the numbers.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the filmmaker behind Birdman and The Revenant, Digger is a dark climate satire rather than another Cruise action vehicle. He plays an oil magnate whose business helps trigger an ecological crisis, forcing a man built on power, greed and self-belief to confront the disaster attached to his own empire. It is deliberately abrasive, formally ambitious and far removed from the clean heroic momentum of Top Gun: Maverick.
The film opened in theaters on October 2 after a heavy promotional campaign and months of Oscar speculation. Its first weekend delivered roughly $8 million in North America and about $21 million worldwide — catastrophic figures for a release of this scale. The weak start immediately shifted the conversation from awards potential and artistic risk to losses, blame and whether the project could possibly recover.
The numbers behind the collapse
The financial exposure is enormous. Reports put the production budget between $160 million and $180 million, before an estimated $100 million marketing campaign. Variety's break-even estimate was around $350 million worldwide, a target that now appears impossibly distant. TheWrap reported that the film could lose as much as $250 million even after post-theatrical revenue is counted.
That projection becomes even more alarming beside reported expectations inside Skydance that Digger may not reach $40 million worldwide. If the trajectory holds, it would place the film in the same grim conversation as studio-era cautionary tales such as John Carter and The Lone Ranger — films remembered as much for the size of their losses as for what appeared on screen.
Audience polling has not supplied an obvious rescue. Digger received a C+ CinemaScore, a result that suggests mixed reactions among the opening-night crowd most motivated to see it. On Rotten Tomatoes, the divide is clearer: about 52 percent of critics were positive, while roughly 73 percent of audience respondents said they enjoyed the movie. That gap has become central to the defense mounted by the film's admirers.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it “the most disappointing film of the year.” Other responses have treated its tonal swings and scale as evidence of self-indulgence. Supporters see the same qualities differently: as signs of a major filmmaker and a major star attempting something confrontational at a time when studios increasingly favor familiar intellectual property and tightly controlled risk.
The Friday box office supplied an especially sharp piece of Hollywood irony. Anne Hathaway's thriller Verity, adapted from Colleen Hoover's novel and co-starring Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, beat Digger as it headed toward an opening of roughly $32 million to $38 million. Reports also say Hathaway and Cruise are due to co-star in a Days of Thunder sequel planned for 2028. Their future collaboration now sits beside an unlikely present-day rivalry between a commercial winner and a costly underperformer.
Anne Hathaway starts the counter-narrative
Hathaway did not treat that rivalry as a reason to stay silent. On October 7, she published her first written Letterboxd review and gave Digger five stars. Calling it “smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious,” she urged moviegoers to make time for the film and reach their own conclusions. Her verdict was unambiguous: “For me? 10/10.”
That intervention mattered because it reframed the movie at the precise moment the box-office narrative threatened to swallow every other conversation. Hathaway was not disputing the receipts. She was arguing that a financial result should not become a substitute for watching, considering and debating the film itself. Her recommendation also carried an unavoidable commercial contrast: Verity was the title beating Digger while its star was telling audiences to give Cruise's film a chance.
Guillermo del Toro sharpened that message on October 8. Praising the film's scale, ambition and theatrical scope on X, he reduced his position to a blunt rallying cry: “Love the arts. F*** the charts.” The phrase captures the tension now surrounding Digger. A studio cannot ignore a loss of this magnitude, but filmmakers do not want the opening-weekend spreadsheet to become the final word on an artistically risky work.
Jane Fonda focused on the gamble itself. In an Instagram post, she described the role as a “big, brave risk” for Cruise and urged both him and Iñárritu to “keep being brave.” She also argued that the movie's provocative approach could wake viewers up to the climate crisis. Her support positioned the film's environmental theme — not its budget — as the reason the attempt deserves attention.
Mandy Patinkin offered the most exuberant endorsement. He called Digger an “instant classic” and “one of the greatest pieces of film” he had seen, then told followers to “run” rather than walk to a theater. Glen Powell and Ron Howard also voiced support for the movie's boldness, adding to the sense that a section of Hollywood sees the critical and commercial pile-on as incomplete.
Cruise responds — and the industry takes sides
Cruise, who produced the film as well as starring in it, responded with gratitude rather than an argument about the returns. He said he was “so happy” and “so honored” to have made the movie with its artists. That response is consistent with the way he promoted Digger: as a purposeful swing, built for cinemas and made with a director whose recent English-language work includes the Oscar-winning landmarks Birdman and The Revenant.
The rally does not erase the economics. A $350 million break-even point cannot be met through goodwill, and a studio facing a possible nine-figure loss will inevitably study what went wrong. Cruise's name, once treated as unusually reliable insurance for expensive theatrical filmmaking, was not enough to turn an uncompromising climate satire into a mass-audience event. Star power can create awareness; it cannot guarantee that awareness converts into tickets.
But the defense also exposes a weakness in the way modern movie culture measures value. Opening-weekend data arrives immediately, travels globally and hardens into a verdict before many potential viewers have seen the work. A film can be branded a bomb within days, after which discussion of form, performance and ideas is forced to compete with the drama of the loss itself. Digger has become a vivid example of that compression.
Hollywood history contains films dismissed on release and reassessed later, after the pressure of opening-weekend expectations has faded. That does not mean Digger is guaranteed a future reappraisal, nor that passionate endorsements prove its critics wrong. It means commercial failure and artistic failure are different judgments, made through different evidence and often on different timelines.
For the industry, the harder question is what lesson executives choose to learn. One conclusion is that budgets approaching $200 million leave almost no room for challenging, divisive material. Another is that theatrical culture becomes less interesting if only broadly agreeable projects are allowed substantial scale. Iñárritu and Cruise made a climate satire with blockbuster resources; the result may be financially ruinous, but its defenders argue that the ambition itself has value.
That is why the saga now matters beyond one movie. Digger is a test of how much risk Hollywood truly wants from its biggest stars, how quickly box-office reporting defines public perception, and whether a passionate minority can keep a bruised film alive after the market has rendered its first verdict. The charts say collapse. The growing chorus around Cruise says the conversation is not over.