‘Digger’ Flops With $8 Million Opening, Becoming the Biggest Bomb of Tom Cruise’s Career

On Monday, Tom Cruise gamely signed autographs and posed for pictures outside The Directors Village for the Los Angeles premiere of “Digger,” flashing the confident smile that had made him a screen legend. Yet, long before Cruise hit the red carpet alongside Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, who he praised for greenlighting “Digger” without needing to turn a page of its script, it was clear that the movie was going to flop. It was too dark, too weird, too critically excoriated. Opening weekend projections kept getting revised downward no matter what Cruise did to hawk the satire — dancing through Jennifer Hudson’s “spirit tunnel,” explaining the finer points of VistaVision to the Kelce brothers, or talking about aging in a completely normal way with GQ. But few could have anticipated just how badly the film would bomb. Well, “Digger” is DOA, having opened to a disastrous $8 million this weekend. It debuted far below the weekend’s other new release, “Verity,” an adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel that critics have lambasted en route to its $32.6 million opening, and was also outgrossed by holdovers like “Resident Evil” and “Primetime.” International audiences, which typically show up for Cruise flicks, aren’t buying tickets. “Digger” earned $12 million from 74 markets to bring irs global haul to a pallid $20 million. The only hope is that “Digger” can reemerge as an awards contender, an improbable outcome, but one that would provide some cultural value. As it stands “Digger,” which officially cost $125 million to produce (sources peg the true price tag at between $160 million to $180 million), needs to make roughly $350 million theatrically to break even. Warner Bros., which backed the film with Legendary, has put the breakeven point at $300 million. That means “Digger” is staring at a loss of $150 million or more, according to two executives with knowledge of its finances. For context, theaters keep half of ticket sales and Warner Bros. spent tens of millions to market “Digger.” A spokesperson for Warner Bros. declined to comment. There’s not much to spin. “Digger” will go down as one of the biggest, if not the biggest flops of Cruise’s career. He’s had a few — “The Mummy,” for instance, lost $95 million and killed Universal’s Dark Universe ambitions in their cradle. The most recent Cruise film to open softer than “Digger,” the 2007 political thriller “Lions for Lambs,” was another disappointment, though it only cost $35 million to make. “Digger” is already a historic bomb, keeping company with the likes of “John Carter,” “Cutthroat Island,” and “The Lone Ranger.” As for De Luca and Abdy, they’re still on the Warners lot, but they won’t be for long. The studio’s new owner, David Ellison, let them know Friday that they wouldn’t continue in their roles when Skydance assumes control and merges the company with Paramount. And the film’s massive losses will justify a pivot that felt inevitable as soon as word broke that Ellison was making a play for Warner Bros. — fewer “Diggers,” more “Days of Thunder 2’s.” Sadly, the mogul may be right from a financial perspective. De Luca and Abdy were the most auteur-friendly of studio chiefs, giving Paul Thomas Anderson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ryan Coogler, and Alejandro González Iñárritu the kind of budgets they would have struggled to secure elsewhere. Sometimes their bets paid off. Few would question the wisdom of the “Sinners” deal they made with Coogler returning the film’s copyright to him, though they did initially. After all, “Sinners” was a huge hit. More recently, De Luca and Abdy’s ambitious gambits have failed to reap profits. Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” and Iñárritu’s “Digger” are among the decade’s biggest money losers, while Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was an Oscar-winning write-down. When “One Battle After Another” swept the Academy Awards, a Paramount executive reminded me of their different mandate. “We don’t lose $100 million to win Best Picture,” the exec scoffed. That may be good news for Skydance’s shareholders, who are understandably worried about how Ellison is going to operate two entertainment giants while paying down $80 billion in debt, but it won’t be great for cinephiles. Love it or hate it, “Digger” is a bold swing. Iñárritu’s dark look at corporate greed and climate change wrestles with lots of big ideas, and Cruise gives the kind of go-for-broke performance that he largely abandoned to play an action hero. It may be a while before moviegoers see him in this mode again. As for Cruise, he may have praised De Luca and Abdy’s chutzpah, but he also is very familiar with Ellison, having made “Top Gun: Maverick” and several “Mission: Impossible” films with Skydance. He’s already given the merger his blessing, telling Pat McAfee that bringing together Warner Bros. and Paramount will lead to “abundance.” “They’re going to deliver 30 movies. It’s a community to me. It’s not an industry. The people in these studios are not just people in the studios, they’re my family,” Cruise told McAfee. “I know we’re going to get those 30 movies. I want us all to come together as a community to help make those 30 movies. It’s not just going to be Paramount doing it. Everyone’s going to need all the help of every artist to be able to do it.” According to a report in TheWrap, when Abdy and De Luca got the call from Ellison telling them that they were out of the family, they had a tart response. “Good luck to you,” Abdy told Ellison with some bitterness. “I left you 39 movies.” But is it a slate filled with more “Sinners” than “Diggers”?