How Digger Dug Its Own Box-Office Grave

The following contains spoilers for the film Digger .

Digger ’s marketing campaign began not with a trailer but with a montage —a reel of previous performances by the movie’s star, Tom Cruise.

There was Cruise in Top Gun , feeling the need for speed; Cruise in Jerry Maguire , committing to showing the money; Cruise in the Mission: Impossible films , dangling from various planes.

The retrospective ended with a snippet of Cruise acting in Digger , but its message was clear: What the movie star of movie stars pulls off in this forthcoming project would be the pinnacle of Cruise-ian cinema, the performance he’s been building toward all this time.

As it turns out, the movie is indeed a historic entry in Cruise’s filmography—though likely not for the reasons anyone involved had hoped.

Digger has become one of the worst-performing releases of his career, making roughly $8 million domestically during its opening weekend against a reported budget of up to $180 million .

Few reviews are glowing; it also has the unfortunate distinction of being the final film released by Warner Bros. before the company’s acquisition by Paramount, a deal that closed this week .

The promotional tone has shifted significantly—no longer are teasers celebrating the opportunity to see Cruise as people have never seen him before.

They now offer a more desperate plea: “ Decide for yourself ,” one of the latest ads says, a shrug of a command.

That Digger ’s marketing relied so heavily on Cruise’s star power isn’t surprising.

But the film’s dramatic bombing at the box office proves the (literal) tomfoolery of making Cruise its only selling point.

For years, the actor has adopted the persona of Hollywood’s unofficial mayor, stressing whenever possible the importance of seeing movies in theaters with crowds.

Digger , however, has no trace of crowd-pleasing in its DNA.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, it’s a satire of a satire that’s both grandiose and grotesque, with a Russian doll–like story structure: At its center is a shouty black comedy about the apocalypse, which is caused by an oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell (Cruise).