Tom Cruise Digger Movie Box Office Bomb Explained

Alejandro González Iñárritu's experimental satire opened to $20 million worldwide against a budget north of $125 million, and Deadline reports Warner Bros could lose $150 million.

Tom Cruise does not do flops. Except now, apparently, he does.

Digger, the Alejandro González Iñárritu film that cast the 62-year-old as a billionaire racing to save the world from a disaster of his own making, has turned into one of the messier box office stories of the year. Deadline, citing multiple sources, reports the film could end up losing Warner Bros around $150 million once marketing and distribution costs are folded in. That's the grim end of the math, and it only holds if Digger actually claws its way to $50 million worldwide, which right now looks like a stretch.

The numbers so far tell two slightly different stories depending on who's counting. JoBlo put the global gross at roughly $20 million after the first week. The Hollywood Gossip pegged the domestic opening alone at just $8 million across 3,000 theatres, against a reported $160 million budget, a figure that sits at the higher end of the $125-$180 million range JoBlo cited. Add another $40 million in marketing and the hole gets deep fast.

For context, Anne Hathaway's Verity opened the same weekend to $32 million. A Colleen Hoover adaptation beat a $150-million Tom Cruise swing for the fences. That's the headline nobody at Warner wanted.

Timing makes it worse. Warner Bros is days from being formally folded into Skydance, which closes its Paramount-adjacent merger on Tuesday. David Ellison's side inherits the mess without having greenlit a dollar of it, which is either lucky or deeply unlucky depending on how you read corporate optics around a deal this size.

So what actually is Digger? Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, described as the most powerful man alive, trying to prove he can save humanity from the very catastrophe he set off. The cast around him is stacked: Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sophie Wilde, Emma D'Arcy, Robert John Burke, Burn Gorman and Pip Torrens. It's currently sitting at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, which tells you the critical split is as messy as the ledger.

JoBlo's Chris Bumbray, for one, isn't writing it off. He called it "highly experimental, to the point that it will alienate and turn off mainstream viewers," but added it "might come to be regarded as an incredibly bold piece of filmmaking further down the line," singling out Cruise's performance as "nothing short of masterful." Online reaction has been split down similar lines, with some calling it audacious and others simply calling it a slog that's less love letter to cinema than a dare aimed at its own audience.

It's billed as a comedy. Bumbray says he didn't laugh once.

As for what's next, The Hollywood Gossip reports that talk of Cruise co-starring with Taylor Swift in an age-gap rom-com appears to be internet speculation with no real backing. What seems more likely, given the Digger numbers, is a retreat to safer ground. Franchise noise around a further Mission Impossible instalment wouldn't shock anyone at this point. Cruise built his brand on the sure thing. This was the one time he bet against it, and the bill is still being tallied.