Tom Cruise's 'Digger' Flops With $8 Million Debut as Warner Bros. Era Ends
Alejandro G. Iñárritu's critically panned satire 'Digger' opened to just $8 million domestically and $12 million overseas, marking one of Tom Cruise's worst career debuts. The $125-150 million gamble landed fifth as Warner Bros. prepares for its Paramount merger.
Tom Cruise has suffered one of the worst opening weekends of his career with «Digger,» the Alejandro G. Iñárritu satire that managed just $8 million in North American ticket sales and $12 million from 74 international markets. The film, which cost at least $125 million to produce and an estimated $100 million more to market, finished fifth at the domestic box office and delivered a painful final note for Warner Bros. as a standalone studio.
Warner Bros. had positioned «Digger» as a potential awards-season heavyweight, releasing it almost exactly a year after «One Battle After Another,» another politically charged, big-budget original from a top filmmaker. That earlier gamble paid off with $213.2 million worldwide and a best picture Oscar. «Digger» will not follow the same path. Reviews were so harsh that the studio resorted to «decide for yourself» advertisements, and box office estimates were revised downward throughout the week leading up to release.
Critics gave the film a 51% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes, describing it as a strained climate change farce, though Cruise's over-the-top performance drew somewhat warmer notices. Audiences were similarly mixed, awarding it a «C+» CinemaScore. To promote the film, Cruise mounted an aggressive campaign that included his first lengthy magazine interview in years, but the effort failed to overcome the negative reception.
The timing could hardly be worse for Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chairs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, who are expected to depart the studio this week. Their big-swing strategy — handing large budgets to acclaimed auteurs working from original stories — appears to be ending as Paramount Skydance closes its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the deal on Wednesday, and Paramount said it would finalize the merger on Tuesday. Mass layoffs are anticipated to follow.
David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a box office newsletter, wrote that «Digger» collapsed this weekend and that the combined company's new leadership — David Ellison, Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg — will soon decide what kind of movies they want from Warner Bros. He noted that Paramount does not have a recent history of making big, auteur-driven films like this, suggesting that strategy «appears to be over and out.»
The disappointing debut also underscores a difficult year for Warner Bros., which has failed to get a single film past $100 million domestically, though its December release «Dune: Part III» is expected to cross that threshold easily. Cruise, 64, has spent most of the past decade starring in «Mission: Impossible» installments and «Top Gun: Maverick,» franchises that kept him a top action draw into his 60s. His last major box office disappointment was 2017's «The Mummy,» which grossed $409.2 million worldwide on a $195 million budget.
North American theaters were led instead by Amazon MGM's «Verity,» which debuted with $32.6 million and extended the box office streak for Colleen Hoover adaptations. Directed by Michael Showalter, the film stars Dakota Johnson as a writer hired to ghostwrite a book series by an incapacitated author played by Anne Hathaway.
The rest of the top sellers were holdovers. Zach Cregger's video game adaptation «Resident Evil» for Sony Pictures came in second with $12.5 million in its third week. Paramount's «Heart of the Beast,» starring Brad Pitt as a retired veteran trekking through the Alaskan wilderness with his combat dog after a plane crash, followed with $11 million. Lance Oppenheim's A24 drama «Primetime,» featuring Robert Pattinson as «To Catch a Predator» host Chris Hansen, collected $8 million in its second weekend.
In a notable shift at the all-time box office, «Avengers: Endgame: Encore» slid to seventh place with $4.4 million domestically and $14.4 million overseas, but the Marvel re-release's second week allowed «Endgame» to nudge ahead of «Avatar» and reclaim the title of highest-grossing film ever, not accounting for inflation. «Endgame» now tallies $2.9255 billion, while «Avatar» stands at $2.9237 billion. The two films have traded the crown in recent years through re-releases.
Rounding out the top ten were «Forgotten Island» with $7.2 million, «Drishyam: The Conclusion» and «Practical Magic 2» each with $2.7 million, and «Spider-Man: Brand New Day» with $2.5 million.
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