The Digger disaster: what an epic movie flop means for Tom Cruise and Hollywood

The fanfare at Digger’s world premiere in London four weeks ago was literal. As the Prince and Princess of Wales took to the stage, their arrival was heralded by the Band of the Irish guards’ fanfare team – bugles gleaming, epaulets shining, bearskin bonnets rippling under the lights.

Given the occasion, the band were not overdressed. Joining William (velvet tux) and Kate (chiffon gown, Princess Diana’s earrings) to introduce the film was cinema’s longest-reigning monarch, Tom Cruise (Armani), along with a retinue including director Alejandro González Iñárritu and co-stars Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and Michael Stuhlbarg. Loyal courtiers filled the front rows: Salma Hayek, Hannah Waddingham and no fewer than three Beckhams (David, Cruz and Romeo).

The film itself started two hours late, thanks to Cruise’s trademark completism with red carpet selfies and autographs. But no one minded, much. If anyone has earned the right to keep 800 people waiting as the babysitter fees mount and they lose all feeling in their legs, it is surely the one remaining unassailable movie star, that most grinning and irresistible enigma, the man who “saved Hollywood’s ass” when Top Gun: Maverick tempted people back to multiplexes after two years of Covid.

At 11pm, when the lights came up, the mood was different. There was disquiet. Applause, too, of course, but also murmurings and scurries for the exit, only lightly hobbled by pins and needles. Could it be that this hottest of tickets was actually a stone cold turkey?

The world premiere turned out to be the high point of Digger’s theatrical run. When the film opened worldwide a week later, reeling from almost universally horrified reviews, the box office was appalling – and went downhill from there. Digger made $8m over its first weekend in the US, before dropping 60% for its second. Its international opening was yet worse: $12m across 74 territories, for a per country average of $6.1k. So far, Digger has made $37.7m. Estimates suggest a final haul of $50m.

Its costs were … higher. Originally budgeted at $125m, production on the six-month shoot spiralled to about $175m. A further $100m was spent on marketing. Given that cinemas retain around half of the revenue of ticket sales, the film would appear to need to make $350m to break even (though Warner Bros puts the number at closer to $300m). These numbers are complicated further by Cruise’s “first-dollar” deal, which means initial takings are diverted straight to him, rather than the studio.

Digger’s predicted $245m loss catapults it smoothly into the upper echelons of the most costly flops of all time, alongside 1995 swashbuckler Cutthroat Island ($222m loss, adjusted for inflation), 2018 steampunk dud Mortal Engines ($224m adjusted) and doomed Captain America spin-off The Marvels (whose estimated adjusted losses range between $205m and $250m). In some sense, Digger has already performed worse than all three. Pre-release, no one had high hopes for any of them – yet they still managed to make at least double what Digger is expected to. No one anticipated Cutthroat Island would upend our ideas about what big swing satire could be. Or that Hugo Weaving’s turn in Mortal Engines would make him an Oscars shoo-in. But Digger is unique: an unprecedented folly of misjudgment, bad timing and spectacular hubris.

To excavate Digger’s fatal flaw, it is helpful to return to its roots. The idea for its central character – a boorish billionaire oil magnate, whose drilling in the arctic triggers eco-catastrophe – came to Iñárritu, the Mexican film-maker who broke through with Amores Perros, in 2015. Then, he was working on The Revenant – another expensive ($165m) epic centred on a big gamey performance, in that case from Leonardo DiCaprio, who, playing a frontiersman on the run, waded through a frozen river, ate raw bison liver, climbed inside a horse’s carcass – and duly won an Oscar. At the same ceremony, Iñárritu also won best director, making him the third person ever to do so in consecutive years, having triumphed in 2014 with the splashy theatrics of Birdman.

Iñárritu has said he didn’t pursue Digger for a while because, despite developing an obsession with the character, he “wasn’t looking for a story” (ominous words, in hindsight). But after The Revenant’s success, he began to develop the concept with Netflix as a vehicle for DiCaprio, under the working title Blah, Blah, Blah (ominous klaxon #2). Then someone at the streamer noticed they already had a pricey eco-dramedy with Leonardo DiCaprio in the works in the form of Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up – the failure of which completes a quick ominous hat-trick – and Digger was ditched. So Iñárritu busied himself instead with Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths: an almost three-hour, black-and-white, existential semi-autographical vanity project of the type only the most recently gilded of directors would have the indulgence to realise. Few people saw it, fewer still liked it.

Meanwhile Cruise, glowing from his recent canonisation as the saviour of cinema, was on the hunt for films to broaden his portfolio beyond action franchises such as Top Gun and Mission: Impossible. Perhaps recalling the delighted horror that met his fat-suited cameo in Tropic Thunder as repellant studio head Les Grossman, he reached out to Iñárritu, and they began work in 2022. The shoot began in late 2024, on 35mm, filmed in Vista Vision – which is, for the avoidance of doubt, magnificently expensive.

This time last year, the film was in post-production, and Cruise was in Los Angeles receiving an honorary Oscar – his first ever Academy Award. His emotional speech detailed a lifetime devoted to the craft. “Making films is not what I do, it is who I am,” he told the crowd. The man to give him the statuette? Iñárritu. The auguries were obvious: if ever a movie were to win Cruise his first Oscar proper, this would be the man who’d hand it to him.

Did anyone notice during production that Digger was awful? Or that sufficient numbers of people were likely to loathe it that the film would be a fiasco? If so, they were either cowed or buoyed by the confidence of the two men at its helm. Plus, says Steven Gaydos, former executive editor of Variety, for the past decade or so, this kind of reckless endeavour has been standard industry practice: “Digger is just the latest Hollywood supertanker art film to go down.”

He tracks the origins of that trend in the pre-pandemic eagerness of streamers to write blank cheques for directors who might confer credibility on them. Auteurs were swift to sign up, but the lack of oversight or guardrails – exactly the terms which sweetened the deal – meant their movies often pleased only themselves.

Sometimes the strategy (since binned at Netflix) sort of worked. Neither Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma nor Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog or David Fincher’s Mank secured Netflix that coveted best picture Oscar, but they came pretty close. Often, it was more obviously unsuccessful. Gaydos highlights the $175m Netflix sunk into Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in 2019, and then the $200m Apple handed him in 2022 for Killers of the Flower Moon. “Again,” says Gaydos, “beaucoup Oscar nominations, no wins”.

Meanwhile traditional studios, spooked by streamers’ dominance, copied the playbook – including the fallout. After awards glory with Whiplash and La La Land, Damien Chazelle saddled Paramount with Babylon: a critical flop which, says Gaydos, “missed recoupment by $135m”. After sweeping the Oscars with Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 repeated the trick at Warner Bros, sinking $200m.

That studio’s form with the Hollywood supertanker art film isn’t all bad: last year they lost $150m on another VistaVision whopper, but at least Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another won them lots of Oscars, including best picture. And at that stage Warners could sustain the hit, coffers swamped from the likes of Sinners, The Minecraft Movie and F1.

This time round, there was no blockbuster safety net – hence, says Gaydos, “this supertanker might have sunk the studio’s chiefs Michael de Luca and Pam Abdy.” The final release from the studio before its Paramount Skydance takeover was such an unqualified calamity that the first move of incoming owner David Ellison was to axe both of them.

Pre-merger, many had voiced concern about the sorts of projects that might be greenlit by the new super-studio. Now they know: Ellison’s appetite for new ideas and original IP will have been diminished yet further. “Overspending on art has never been a winning strategy in Hollywood,” says Gaydos. “But no one’s ever seen the scale of these recent maydays and the oceans of red ink the supertanker art films have left in their wake.”

Of all the injured parties emerging from the wreckage of Digger – save perhaps for De Luca and Abdy – Cruise is the most mortally wounded. He’s had misfires before: 2017’s The Mummy lost $95m, but still grossed over $400m. The only conclusions to be drawn will be chastening for a man who would have assumed he was appreciated as much as an artist as a preternaturally-youthful pensioner with a fierce commitment to near-fatal stunts and taking his top off.

Yet clearly, it seems, people do not go to a Tom Cruise movie to see him act. They go to see a movie star. Yes, he sported prosthetics in Tropic Thunder, but you could still see the man beneath the mask, and he wasn’t in it for long anyway. In Digger, so thick are the layers of rubber it might as well be anyone beneath them.

Aside from riding a motorbike off a cliff, Cruise’s fans do not want him to take risks, nor to indulge in the level of belligerent insanity both he and his character display here, which serves as an uncomfortable reminder of the Oprah sofa-jumping years. They also want him to be the good guy. In Top Gun and, especially, Mission: Impossible, he’s a quasi-Messiah: the only man able save the world. In Digger, he plays the only man able to destroy it. That’s the opposite of what Cruise’s fanbase wants.

Yet beyond Cruise’s usual acolytes, there are plenty of people who might well have been keen to seen Digger if they’d known what it really was: an ambitious, meta-textual liberal satire that seeks to address collective culpability for ecological collapse. Unfortunately all of the promotion for the film has sought to suppress this – in part because explaining how necessitates revealing a major plot spoiler.

Instead, the push focused on its star’s transformation, on teases and reveals of Digger’s colossal tum and obnoxious hectoring. So confident were the makers of Digger in their film’s pre-sold allure they forgot to actually sell it.

By the time the reviews were out, the marketing had no choice but to scramble. A new campaign was launched quoting both negative and positive reviews, before urging audiences to ignore the critics and judge for themselves. Retrospectively positioning a movie’s divisiveness as intentional isn’t necessarily a bad plan. But the strategy inevitably recalled that taken by Francis Ford Coppola’s $125m disaster Megalopolis in 2024 – which further self-sabotaged by attributing made-up quotes to real-life critics. This was an unhappy association and within days, Digger’s ads pivoted again, suddenly telling punters they should take note of the critics after all, because although US reviewers were iffy, the French really liked it.

By then, the muddle didn’t matter. Only the morbidly curious could be tempted to the cinema. Word of mouth did its own work, too: Digger’s CinemaScore (which records exiting audience reaction on US opening night) was C+. That’s considerably less than the new Paw Patrol movie (A) and worse even than new Mark Zuckerberg drama The Social Reckoning (B+) – whose own duff box office further suggests people aren’t automatically eager to spend their weekends gazing at supersized billionaires doing dreadful things.

Cruise may still discreetly campaign for an Oscar nomination – the cost of doing so would be small change compared with the losses already incurred. In a year of standout performances from the likes of Andrew Scott (Elsinore) and John Malkovich (Wild Horse Nine), victory is all but impossible, yet Cruise and co may yet calculate that some such acknowledgment from his peers might help lessen the blow – and vindicate everyone’s decision-making.

And, in fact, there are early signs that the scale of Digger’s disaster may work in its favour. After all, this is no Bardo-ish damp squib, destined to be a footnote in a book no one ever reads. This is a movie whose title is already synonymous with gobsmacking folly. An apparently grassroots lobby is making a compelling case for Digger being a cult classic in the making. Celebrities have put their heads above the parapet to champion it – and not only partisan ones such as Anne Hathaway, set to star with Cruise in the upcoming Days of Thunder sequel, who gave it 10/10 on Letterboxd, or Glen Powell – whom Cruise mentored on Top Gun: Maverick – and who called it “pure cinematic joy”.

Jane Fonda cheerled at length for the film on Instagram, calling Cruise “very good and very brave”. “Daring, bold and cinematically complex,” chipped in Guillermo del Toro. Neil Young named it “the best film I have ever seen”. Meanwhile, commemorative programmes from that world premiere – still less than a month ago – are already fetching considerable sums on eBay. Digger, it seems, is unlikely to stay buried for ever.