Tom Cruise Defends Digger After $7.5M Opening Weekend

The film's domestic haul barely clears Cruise's 2007 flop Lions for Lambs, and reports put its budget as high as $160 million against a C+ CinemaScore.

Tom Cruise is not backing away from Digger, even with the numbers staring back at him.

The actor posted a set of behind-the-scenes photos on X Saturday, thanking his cast and crew after the film's theatrical bow. "DIGGER is officially in theaters and I am so honored to have had the opportunity to create this film alongside such talented artists," he wrote, calling the shoot "truly unforgettable" and saying he's "so proud of what we created."

What they created opened to $7.5 million domestic, with $3.4 million of that coming Friday across 3,321 locations including Imax screens. For a film reportedly budgeted at $125 million, and by some accounts north of $160 million, that's a number nobody on the marketing team wanted to see on a Monday morning.

Here's the context that makes it sting. Cruise's last comparable low was 2007's Lions for Lambs, the Robert Redford war drama he starred in alongside Meryl Streep, which opened to $6.7 million. Digger has now quietly slid in just above that, becoming Cruise's weakest opening weekend in nearly two decades at a moment when the film was supposed to be doing the opposite, building him a case for an acting Oscar he's never actually won despite the honorary one already on his shelf.

The film itself, directed by Alejandro Iñárritu, casts Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon whose greed sets off a global catastrophe before the president, played by John Goodman, tasks him with fixing what he broke. Beyond that, plot details have become something of a running joke online, with viewers debating what the movie is actually about days after release.

Critics and audiences aren't aligned either. Digger sits at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics but 71% from audiences, alongside a C+ CinemaScore, the kind of split that usually means a film is more interesting to argue about than to recommend outright.

Guillermo del Toro jumped into that argument this week, posting that the "entirely petty" coverage around the opening undersold what he saw on screen. "The film delivers in scale, ambition and reach at a theatrical screen level," he wrote, calling it "daring, bold and cinematically complex" and firmly "a theatrical experience." Alfonso Cuarón has also spoken up in the film's defense, according to trade reports, putting two Oscar-winning directors publicly on Cruise's side even as the opening weekend tells a rougher story.

There's a comparison some are already reaching for, Damien Chazelle's Babylon, a Paramount release that managed just $65.2 million worldwide against a much bigger budget and still built a cult following over time. Whether Digger gets that second life depends on word of mouth holding up through the next few weekends and on whether Oscar voters are willing to look past a rough opening when ballots go out.

For now, Cruise is doing what Cruise does after a shoot, thanking everyone involved and calling it unforgettable. Whether that word survives contact with the box office charts over the next month is the actual story.