Tom Cruise has survived collapsing buildings, fighter jets, motorcycles flying off cliffs, and just about every impossible mission Hollywood can throw at him.
But Digger may have finally found something even Tom Cruise can’t outrun: a brutal box office opening.
The new comedy opened October 2 and reportedly pulled in only about $8 million domestically and another $12 million internationally, which would be bad enough on its own. The bigger problem is that Digger reportedly cost somewhere between $140 million and $180 million to make.
That means the movie may need somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million to $350 million worldwide just to break even.
At the moment, that feels like a pretty massive climb.
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the filmmaker behind Birdman and The Revenant, Digger stars Cruise as an eccentric oil tycoon whose aggressive Arctic drilling operation helps trigger an environmental disaster.
And on paper, this thing has everything.
You’ve got Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons. You’ve got an Oscar-winning director. You’ve got a massive budget.
What you apparently don’t have is a lot of people rushing to buy tickets.
Reviews haven’t exactly helped. The response has been mixed, with a lot of critics praising the performances but struggling with the movie’s odd tone, satire and overall approach. It sounds like one of those movies that takes a huge swing — and whether you think it connects probably depends on how much weirdness you’re willing to tolerate.
That’s where Digger gets interesting.
If this exact movie had starred some indie actor and cost $20 million, people might be calling it a bold, strange experiment. But when you put Tom Cruise, one of the biggest movie stars alive, in the middle of a $150-million-plus art-house satire, expectations change pretty quickly.
And so does the math.
If the numbers continue in this direction, Digger could end up becoming not only one of the biggest disappointments of Cruise’s career, but one of the more expensive box office misfires in recent memory.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the movie is bad.
It may just mean audiences looked at Tom Cruise, saw a bizarre environmental satire instead of Ethan Hunt hanging off an airplane, and collectively said:
“Yeah… maybe next weekend.”
