Anatomy of a flop: ‘Digger’ a disaster at box office and a major misfire for Tom Cruise
The Tom Cruise starring black comedy 'Digger' has tanked at the box office and threatens to become one of the biggest box office disasters of recent times.
It was a big swing, and it has turned out to be a huge miss.What was supposed to be the awards season heavyweight to finally get Tom Cruise to the Oscar podium has ended up as one of the biggest box office flops of the actor’s career. Worse, early indicators strongly suggest that Digger is on track to lose between $150-200 million. Those are John Carter numbers.The movie, starring Tom Cruise as a powerful oil tycoon who has triggered an environmental disaster, made just $8 million in the US and $20 million globally in its opening weekend.
By comparison, Digger had a production budget of up to $180m.On top of Digger ’s huge budget, the trades report that Warner Bros. spent another $100m on marketing, which means that the movie needs to make $300m just to break even.Granted, intake never equates to quality, but when an Oscar-winning director of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s calibre teams up with Tom Cruise, one of the world’s biggest stars and box office magnets, this disastrous performance is notable.Digger was always a gamble as a rare big-budget, star-driven original comedy.
The metatextual eco-satire has proven to be audience antagonizing, with its bold twist being both admirable in its ambition and a baffling gambit. In Euronews Culture’s review of Digger, we wrote: “Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant, Bardo), a polarising filmmaker to begin with, has made both the boldest film of 2026 and this year’s wildest misfire. Digger is certainly his most pretentious film to date.
(...) It’s hard to write more about Digger without spoiling Iñárritu’s brave but misguided gambit, but safe to say that once he does pull the rug from under the audience, he leaves viewers with a boated folly that’s both hollow and heavy-handed.” Read the full, spoiler-free review here. Digger’s dismal box office numbers contribute to an annus horribilis for Warner Bros., as the studio has struggled throughout 2026 to gross more than $100 million domestically for each of its releases so far.
Both The Bride and Supergirl produced big losses for the studio. Additionally, the timing of Digger ’s commercial failure couldn’t be worse. Paramount Skydance’s controversial acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is set to close next week after approval from the US district court for the $110bn deal was received last Wednesday. Warner Bros.'s only hope at salvaging its disastrous year will come in December, with the release of Dune: Part Three, which is projected to open globally to around $200-230 million.