Thought Tom Cruise couldn’t miss? Digger is staring at a reported $150M loss
If you thought Tom Cruise was box-office bulletproof, Digger just delivered his weakest opening in 19 years — and the losses could be brutal.
Well, here's one for the books: Tom Cruise's latest, Digger, has managed to dig itself quite a hole right out of the gate. If you're after a comeback story, this isn't quite it—unless you're measuring by sheer catastrophe. The film has opened to numbers so underwhelming it actually marks Cruise's worst domestic debut in nearly two decades. No one had this down as a hit-and-run, especially not with Alejandro Iñárritu at the helm. So what on earth happened?
Digger tumbled to just $8 million for its opening weekend in the US, and has only clawed together $20 million worldwide so far.
The Sums Don't Add Up
If you fancy a bit of Hollywood accounting, it's brutal. Between production and one of those absolutely huge global marketing spends (about $100 million just to plaster Cruise's face everywhere), the all-in cost has crept up to a whopping $275 million worldwide. Warner Bros. initially backed the project with $125 million—the Cruise-Iñárritu pairing sounded bulletproof. But a protracted UK shoot at Leavesden saw that balloon out to a net cost of around $160 million before a single punter bought a ticket.
What's grim is all Digger really needs, according to Deadline's insiders, is a global haul of about $50 million just to dull the pain a bit. Even that's starting to look out of reach if the early tracking holds up. When you put all this together, some smart folks reckon Warners could be staring at a $150 million loss on this one. Ouch.
Audience Reaction – Or Lack Of It
You might expect the public to come roaring out for Cruise and Iñárritu. Evidently not. US audiences gave the thing a C+ CinemaScore—shades above apathy, but not enough to spark follow-up trips. Critics haven't helped, parking it at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. It didn't help that, ahead of launch, the word-of-mouth just nosedived. Social metrics outfit RelishMix watched the film's online sentiment score shrink dramatically—from 8.1/10 a few weeks out, down to just 6.4 at release. People online couldn't quite tell if the movie meant to take itself seriously, or if the whole premise was some extended send-up. (The trailers certainly didn't help clear things up.)
The Fallout At Warner Bros.
The studio can hardly be thrilled that this lemon landed right after they managed to pull off a record $4.3 billion global box office gross for 2025—their best haul since before the pandemic. But timing is never anyone's friend in this business. It's landed, too, on the same week Skydance co-CEO David Ellison decided not to extend the contracts for Warners' top film bosses Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy. One crisis at a time, apparently.
Still, some in Cruise's camp are maintaining it's not the end of the world. The logic goes: every one of his films in cinemas just buoys up the value of his considerable back-library—now £14 billion strong across fifty-odd movies. You saw the same argument from Paramount insiders when Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning tripped at the box office. Maybe they're right, and this one gets quietly bundled into 'the brand.' But for now, Digger looks like it's well and truly buried.