Tom Cruise's big-budget film Digger is projected to lose $245 million, according to The Guardian, after a steep fall in its second weekend in cinemas. The film dropped 60% in US ticket sales after opening to $8 million, and its international debut brought in $12 million across 74 territories. Variety first reported the $245 million loss estimate.
The film has earned $37.7 million so far, with analysts cited by The Guardian expecting a final total of around $50 million. That figure sits far below what the movie would need to recover its costs.
Why it matters
The scale of the loss places Digger among the most expensive flops in film history. The Guardian notes it ranks alongside 1995's Cutthroat Island, which lost $222 million when adjusted for inflation, 2018's Mortal Engines at $224 million adjusted, and The Marvels, whose adjusted losses are estimated between $205 million and $250 million.
What sets Digger apart, according to The Guardian, is that none of those earlier films carried such high expectations. The paper describes the project as a combination of poor judgment, unfortunate timing and extraordinary overconfidence. Its failure also raises questions about Cruise's standing as one of the few remaining stars who can draw audiences on name alone, and about how studios weigh risky, expensive original films.
A premiere that marked the high point
The film's world premiere in London four weeks ago was a grand affair. The Prince and Princess of Wales attended, introduced by a fanfare team from the Band of the Irish Guards. Cruise arrived in Armani, accompanied by director Alejandro González Iñárritu and co-stars Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and Michael Stuhlbarg. Salma Hayek, Hannah Waddingham and three members of the Beckham family were among those in the front rows.
The screening itself began two hours late because Cruise was signing autographs and posing for photos on the red carpet, a habit The Guardian describes as typical of him. Guests were reportedly patient about the delay. But when the lights came up at 11pm, the mood had shifted. There was applause, but also unease and a rush for the exits. The Guardian reports that the premiere turned out to be the high point of the film's entire run.
Reviews when the film opened worldwide a week later were almost uniformly hostile, according to The Guardian, and ticket sales were poor from the start. The international opening averaged just $6,100 per country across 74 territories.
Costs that kept climbing
Digger was originally budgeted at $125 million, but the six-month shoot pushed production costs to roughly $175 million. Marketing added another $100 million. Since cinemas typically keep about half of ticket revenue, The Guardian reports the film would need to take around $350 million to break even, though Warner Bros puts the figure nearer $300 million.
Cruise's contract also complicates the math. He holds a "first-dollar" deal, meaning early receipts go to him before the studio sees any return.
The project's history stretches back further than its release. Iñárritu came up with the central character — a crude billionaire oil magnate whose Arctic drilling causes an environmental disaster — in 2015, while working on The Revenant. That film, which cost $165 million, won Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar and earned Iñárritu a second consecutive best director award, after Birdman the year before.
Iñárritu later developed the concept with Netflix as a DiCaprio vehicle under the working title Blah, Blah, Blah. The streaming service dropped it after noticing it already had a costly environmental satire with DiCaprio in development: Adam McKay's Don't Look Up. Iñárritu then made Bardo, a nearly three-hour black-and-white semi-autobiographical film that The Guardian says few people saw and fewer liked.
Cruise, meanwhile, was looking for projects beyond the action franchises that made him famous, such as Top Gun and Mission: Impossible. The Guardian suggests he may have been thinking of his comic turn as studio executive Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. He approached Iñárritu, and the two began working together in 2022. Shooting started in late 2024 on 35mm film in Vista Vision, a format The Guardian describes as very expensive.
Wider concerns for Hollywood
The fallout has extended beyond the film itself. Ben Affleck has warned about what happens when Hollywood punishes risk-taking, according to The News International. The Guardian's analysis frames Digger as a test case for whether studios will keep backing large, original, director-driven films when the downside is this severe.
The film's reception also drew comment from critics elsewhere. Dawn Images reviewed Digger as a story about bad men and the narratives they construct about themselves.
For Cruise, the result arrives at an awkward moment. Around this time last year he was in Los Angeles accepting an honorary Oscar, his first Academy Award, in a speech that reflected on his career. The Guardian notes that his reputation as the star who helped bring audiences back to cinemas with Top Gun: Maverick after the pandemic made this project's collapse especially striking.
What happens next will depend on whether Warner Bros adjusts its accounting expectations and how the industry reads the result. The coming months will show whether Digger is treated as an isolated misfire or as a signal that studios should pull back from expensive bets on original material.
