Tom Cruise’s $160 Million Climate Film ‘Digger’ Pulls Just $3.4 Million Including Previews

Adriana Stone 0 2 min read

Tom Cruise’s $160 Million Climate Film ‘Digger’ Pulls Just $3.4 Million Including Previews

Tom Cruise’s new Warner Bros. movie Digger is off to a rough start. The climate-change film brought in just $3.4 million on Friday, a figure that includes Thursday previews, from more than 3,300 theaters across North America.

Some estimates suggest Digger could finish its domestic opening weekend with roughly $10 million. That would be a major disappointment for a movie built around one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Earlier projections had placed the opening weekend between $12 million and $15 million.

Variety’s early update said the film had made $1.2 million in previews and was tracking below those projections. The box-office performance puts even more pressure on a production carrying a massive price tag.

The budget figures themselves are unusually large and somewhat inconsistent. The film has been described as carrying a $160 million production budget, not including marketing. The story also notes that the budget was initially listed at $125 million before reportedly climbing above $160 million after production went over schedule.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Digger stars Cruise as a grotesque billionaire oil tycoon. After an accident at one of his drilling sites, a massive section of Greenland’s ice shelf breaks away and heads toward Europe, threatening catastrophic destruction.

Rockwell is then brought into an emergency meeting with the U.S. president, played by John Goodman. Officials scramble to prevent the looming disaster. But the movie later reveals that the events are part of a stage production called Fossil Fools, depicting a climate catastrophe that took place decades earlier within the film’s fictional timeline.

That twist means Cruise is actually playing an actor named Curtis Markson, who is portraying Rockwell in the production. It is a sprawling setup for a climate-change satire, but early audiences do not appear especially impressed.

Digger received a mediocre C+ CinemaScore, while reviews have been sharply divided. Warner Bros. even turned to an unusual marketing strategy that highlighted the movie’s terrible reviews and encouraged potential viewers to make up their own minds. The message was simple: “You decide.”

The weak opening is particularly notable because Cruise remains one of the most marketable stars in the movie business. Top Gun: Maverick grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide in 2022. Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise has also generated billions of dollars at the global box office.

That track record has not been enough to bring large crowds to this particular project. Even Cruise’s star power appears unable to overcome the limited audience interest in a sprawling climate-change satire with a huge production budget.

Warner Bros. may still hope for a turnaround overseas and stronger results in the weeks ahead. But unless that happens, Digger could become one of the year’s most expensive box-office disasters.

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