So, about that box office crash — Tom Cruise’s Digger’s Oscar-winning director gets blunt
After Tom Cruise’s Digger crashed at the box office and split critics, Oscar-winner Alejandro González Iñárritu offered a blunt admission about the reaction that might raise eyebrows.
Alejandro González Iñárritu is at it again with Digger, a film that's managing the rare trick of winding up just about everyone – including, apparently, its own director. If you’ve missed the noise, this is Iñárritu’s big stab at a climate satire starring none other than Tom Cruise, which, on paper, should've meant big business and bigger headlines. Instead, tickets are gathering dust and the critics can’t seem to agree on whether it’s an overlooked triumph or simply a misfire.
Digger opened in cinemas with just $8 million at the US box office, Tom Cruise’s worst opening since 2007’s Lions for Lambs.
Digger versus the Box Office
It's safe to say Digger hasn’t exactly set tills ringing. Even with Cruise front and centre, the opening weekend landed with a thud: $8 million in the US, the lowest domestic debut Tom Cruise has had since Lions for Lambs nearly twenty years ago. For context, that puts it behind the likes of Verity, Resident Evil, and Heart of the Beast, which is not where anyone expected a Cruise vehicle to end up in the pecking order.
The critical response is hardly a love letter, either. Rotten Tomatoes has critics sitting at 51%, although audiences are a bit kinder at 71%. Things aren’t much brighter on Metacritic, where critics dropped a 46/100 and users have it at 66/100. In summary: lots of shrugs and a few scowls, with the odd voice shouting it’s a misunderstood gem. And yes, for a film that paints itself as a climate disaster drama, you can already guess the 'disaster' puns in half the reviews. They’re not wrong, in the financial sense.
Iñárritu’s Take: ‘Start the Conversation’
So, what does Iñárritu make of all this? As it turns out, he’d rather have people up in arms than bored stiff. Discussing Digger’s reception with The New York Times, he was pretty clear on where he stands:
I prefer that to the lukewarm reception... There's people that want more certainty in the storytelling, and that's OK too. This is not like an ice cream. So, yeah, we expected that, to be honest.
He’s not pretending the film's flawless, either. Iñárritu says it 'misses the mark in places' and admits it’s 'not perfect.' But he sticks by the decision to make a film that’s deliberately provoking rather than crowd-pleasing. The idea was never to go down easy – it's a film as conversation-starter, not comfort viewing.
He describes the Cruise-fronted offering as a challenge to the audience, not just a neat package of answers. According to Iñárritu, this isn’t the sort of film for anyone wanting tidy resolutions and clear morals. If you prefer a bit of narrative certainty, he reckons that's entirely fair – but Digger was never meant to be cinema’s answer to vanilla ice cream.
At the heart of it, Iñárritu frames the film as holding up a mirror to the audience rather than lecturing. For those on the lookout for a 'disaster movie', he argues the disaster at stake is, pointedly, us. He’s unafraid of divisiveness; indifference, he reckons, would be worse. For now, that’s as much of a win as he seems to want.