For Alejandro González Iñárritu, the scariest part of making 'Digger' wasn't the climate catastrophe

"Digger" director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu.

Jesus Hellin/Getty Images On paper, Alejandro González Iñárritu's new movie had all the trappings of a hit.

The Oscar-winning director had assembled a star-studded cast led by the inimitable Tom Cruise .

He had a twisty and surprising script that uses satire to tackle ambitious topics, and a talented team that built set pieces impressive enough to match.

But he was still nervous about the execution.

"The acting tone was the most scary part for me," Iñárritu told Business Insider shortly before the movie's opening weekend.

"Tone, you cannot write — you have to feel it and hear it." Four days later, the verdict at the box office came in: "Digger" was a bomb.

The climate-change satire starring Cruise, John Goodman , Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg , Jesse Plemons, and Emma D'Arcy made $8 million in its opening weekend on a reported $180 million budget, making it the lowest opening weekend for Cruise in 19 years.

The movie is projected to bring in only $50 million worldwide by the end of its theatrical run.

Tom Cruise with the infamous cat in "Digger." Warner Bros.

To add insult to injury, film critics, who helped make his previous work like "The Revenant" and "Birdman" Oscar darlings, lambasted Iñárritu for even attempting something as grandiose and ambitious as "Digger." The Hollywood Reporter called it "so meta that you watch in excruciating weariness as it disappears up its own ass." IndieWire described it as "so detached from human truth that its most believable character is a one-eyed animatronic cat." The movie currently holds a 53% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest for Iñárritu and lowest for Cruise in close to a decade.

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Not everyone disliked the movie.