Tom Cruise's Digger is losing $245 million, and I'd bet it's the next Fight Club
Every weekend Digger loses more money, and every weekend someone more famous stands up for it. A few of them happen to vote for the Oscars.
Hideo Kojima has joined the queue. On 14 October 2026, once his conversation with Alejandro González Iñárritu was out on Gizmodo Japan, the creator of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding posted on X that Digger is a film people living in today's world should see. He had been sitting on his verdict, he explained, until the interview went live.
His timing is either terrible or perfect. Digger opened on 2 October to $8 million in North America, fell 60% in its second weekend and stands at $14.4 million domestically and $35.3 million worldwide. Warner Bros. is now bracing to lose $245 million on it, according to Variety's sources: the budget swelled from $125 million to somewhere between $160 million and $180 million, with another $100 million spent on marketing. Critics left it barely above 50% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The defence grows with every weekend
Kojima is only the latest name. Anne Hathaway, Jane Fonda, Guillermo del Toro and Mandy Patinkin all spoke up for the film before him. On 12 October Ben Affleck went further on Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, comparing the gloating over the box office to "the high school bullying thing", as TheWrap reported. His warning was that if you punish films that take risks, you get homogenised rubbish.
"You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing."
— Ben Affleck, on Happy Sad Confused
The film fans on r/oscarrace have noticed the pattern. One top comment under the Kojima news reads: "the way the industry is embracing it just to spite the critics makes me feel like Tom is the one actually winning".
The worse Digger does at the box office, the longer the list of people willing to defend it.
Flops normally get buried quietly. This one is being adopted by the very people who usually keep their heads down.
Fight Club flopped first
In autumn 1999, David Fincher's Fight Club took about $37 million in North America on a $63 million budget and roughly $100 million worldwide. Critics were split, the studio struggled to sell it, and it was written off as an expensive mistake. Then it found its audience on DVD and in student flats, and nobody quotes its opening weekend any more.
Read more: Tom Cruise's Digger got all the headlines — Brad Pitt's dog film got the audience
Digger has the same ingredients, and I'd put money on the same ending:
- A film the studio couldn't explain: Warner Bros. ran social media spots telling people to "decide for yourself", because the reviews were that bad.
- Critics at war with each other: Peter Bradshaw gave it two stars in The Guardian; Robbie Collin gave it four in The Telegraph and called it "a Dr. Strangelove for the climate crisis".
- An audience warmer than the critics: the Rotten Tomatoes audience score sits well above the Tomatometer.
Films like that don't die at the box office. They get rediscovered on the telly a few years later, by people who never read the reviews.
Cruise isn't the loser in this story
The Wall Street Journal has already filed the obituary for the awards run: "Tom Cruise Was Going Full Tilt for His First Oscar. Then Digger Flopped." Fair enough on paper. Cruise has four nominations and still no competitive Oscar, and Variety notes that Warner Bros. may scale back a campaign that would normally cost around $15 million.
My view is the opposite. I can't remember Hollywood closing ranks like this around any of Cruise's hits. Nobody had to defend Top Gun: Maverick; it made nearly $1.5 billion and defended itself. The people queueing up for Digger now are directors, actors and producers, which is to say Academy voters. A vote for Digger is turning into a vote against the gloating.
Cruise spent forty years chasing an Oscar with films everybody saw. He might finally get one for the film nobody went to see.
Read more: Thirteen weeks in, Nolan's Odyssey earned more per cinema than the new Sorkin and Cruise films