'Love the arts, f— the charts': Hollywood rallies behind Tom Cruise's $280 million flop Digger
Anne Hathaway, Jane Fonda and Guillermo del Toro defend Tom Cruise's Digger after an $8 million opening and a projected $150 million loss for Warner Bros.
Digger cost Warner Bros. somewhere north of a quarter of a billion dollars and opened to $8 million. Half of Hollywood has decided the problem is you.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger opened on 2 October 2026 with $3.4 million on its first day and roughly $8 million over the weekend from 3,321 North American cinemas, plus $12 million overseas for a $20 million global start. It is Tom Cruise's lowest opening as a leading man in 19 years, since Lions for Lambs in 2007. Audiences gave it a C+ CinemaScore. A week later, its busiest screening room is Instagram, where the A-list has turned out to defend it.
Guillermo del Toro supplied the slogan. On 8 October he posted on X: "Love the arts. F— the charts."
Who has signed up
The list reads like an awards-season dinner party, and most guests have a reason to be there.
- Anne Hathaway made her Letterboxd debut with Digger, giving it five stars and a 10/10 and calling it brilliant, smart and trippy. Her own film, Verity, topped the box office the same weekend Digger sank, and she is about to co-star with Cruise in Days of Thunder 2.
- Jane Fonda praised Cruise on Instagram for taking a "big, brave risk" and told him and Iñárritu to "keep being brave".
- Mandy Patinkin called it an "instant classic" and urged people to get to a cinema.
- Glen Powell, Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick co-star, praised its scale and the performances.
Cruise himself got in first, the weekend it opened: "The experience was truly unforgettable and I'm so proud of what we created." Fair enough. Nobody expects a man to slag off his own film.
The bill for the arts
The trouble is the maths. Variety puts the production budget at $160 million to $180 million, with about $100 million more on marketing, and estimates Digger needs around $350 million worldwide to break even. Warner Bros. disputes that and puts its own break-even closer to $300 million. Either way, Deadline expects a loss of around $150 million, and that is if it reaches $50 million globally.
This is not a festival oddity that slipped out on 40 screens. It is Cruise's first non-action lead in years, a satire about an oil tycoon called Digger Rockwell whose greed triggers a global catastrophe, released wide by a major studio with a nine-figure campaign. The audience did show up to judge it. There just weren't many of them.
The arts, in this case, came with a $100 million marketing budget.
On r/boxoffice and r/oscarrace, the defence has not landed. "It's a big-studio movie that cost nearly $200 million and flopped," reads one of the most upvoted replies. Another asks the obvious question: "Where were they for Kraven?" Sony's Spider-Man spin-off bombed in 2024 without a single Oscar winner posting about bravery.
Who they are really defending
The cynical reading on r/oscarrace is that the chorus is less about Cruise, who will be fine, than about Iñárritu, whose last film was Netflix's Bardo in 2022 and who could be heading for what one commenter called "director jail". Del Toro and Iñárritu are two of the "Three Amigos" of Mexican cinema, which makes "f— the charts" read less like a manifesto and more like a mate turning up with a casserole.
Gold Derby is already floating a Best Picture run, and nothing in the early second-weekend reporting suggests a turnaround at the tills. If the Academy does come calling, Hollywood will have proved its point. The charts will still have the final word on the next $280 million cheque.
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