Digger Becomes the Worst Opening of Tom Cruise's Career as WB
Summary
Alejandro G. Inarritu's $160 to $180 million satire grossed just $8 million domestically and $20 million worldwide, a disastrous send-off timed to the week the studio became part of Skydance
Digger, Alejandro G. Inarritu's climate-change satire starring Tom Cruise, opened to an estimated $8 million domestically from 3,300 theaters, the worst opening weekend of Cruise's career since 2007's Lions for Lambs, which debuted to $6.7 million on a $35 million budget, according to Variety, IndieWire and Fortune. International box office added just $12 million from 74 markets, bringing the worldwide opening to roughly $20 million against a production budget reported between $160 million and $180 million; a Warner Bros. spokesperson told Variety the film needs to gross $300 million to break even. The film carries a C+ CinemaScore, a 51 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and a 45 Metacritic rating. Warner Bros. responded to harsh reviews by running advertisements inviting audiences to "decide for yourself," and Cruise, appearing on a press tour that included explaining VistaVision to NFL players the Kelce brothers, could not reverse the trend. The disappointing opening lands the same week Warner Bros.' acquisition by Paramount Skydance closed, with multiple outlets framing Digger as the studio's final major release operating as a fully standalone company. Outgoing Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy had greenlit the project; both departed as part of the merger's leadership transition.
The Kinolime Lens
The timing here matters more than the number itself: a film this expensive failing this badly in the exact week De Luca and Abdy's successors take over gives the new Goldberg-and-Greenstein regime an immediate, very public argument for tighter creative oversight, whether or not that's a fair read of what went wrong with Digger specifically. A satire this political, built around a two-time Oscar-winning director's original vision rather than IP, failing at this scale is also the kind of data point that makes every studio more conservative about funding similarly ambitious swings for the next several years, independent of whether the film itself deserved better.
