Digger Box Office Bomb Heads for $245M Loss

The Digger box office story just got uglier: Tom Cruise's eco-satire is now on course to lose roughly two hundred and forty-five million dollars, according to estimates reported by The Guardian, which would put it among the biggest flops in movie history.

What happened this weekend

Digger, directed by Alejandro G Iñárritu and released by Warner Bros, fell hard in its second weekend in North America. According to The Guardian, which cites a Variety report, it pulled in an estimated three point two million dollars, a sixty percent drop from its eight million dollar opening.

That leaves the domestic total at about fourteen point four million dollars and the global total at roughly thirty-five million dollars. Deadline's weekend chart, according to Deadline, tells the same story: Digger slid to eighth place, behind a horror movie about a creepy doppelganger mom and a pack of holdovers.

The projected final worldwide haul is only around fifty million dollars. For a film starring one of the last true movie stars on the planet, that is a brutal number.

Why the math is so bad

Variety estimates the production cost at between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and eighty million dollars, well over the original budget of one hundred and twenty-five million. Add roughly another hundred million for marketing, and the bill climbs fast.

Cinemas keep around half of ticket sales, so Variety figures the film would need about three hundred and fifty million dollars to break even. A Warner Bros spokesperson disputes that, saying the break-even point is three hundred million, which would imply a smaller production spend of about one hundred and fifty million.

Either way, the gap is enormous. Another fifteen million dollars may have been set aside for awards-season campaigning, but that spending is likely to be scaled back now.

Critics could not agree either

The film is an eco-fable satire with a climate-change twist, the kind of ambitious swing that studios used to protect for awards season. Instead of a victory lap, it is now a case study in how fast a big bet can unravel when the audience simply does not turn up.

Reaction to the film has been wildly split. The Guardian's chief film critic Peter Bradshaw called it "an exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory satire" in a two-star review, while a Guardian Australia editor argued it was "a masterpiece".

Warner Bros even tried to lean into the argument by running ads that quoted the negative reviews. It does not seem to have helped. If you want to see how this kind of culture-war marketing plays out, check our movies coverage for more.

A rough year for Warner Bros

Digger is the last Warner Bros release before its takeover by David Ellison's Skydance, according to The Guardian. The studio has also stumbled with Supergirl and The Bride this year, and co-chairs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are due to leave before the deal closes.

That is a sharp contrast with last year, when A Minecraft Movie, Sinners and F1 helped it become the second most successful studio, behind Disney.

The Guardian puts a two hundred and forty-five million dollar loss alongside legendary turkeys like Cutthroat Island, Mortal Engines and The Marvels. Those are the films that film nerds still bring up years later as cautionary tales.

The bigger picture for theaters

The Digger box office numbers also land in a weirdly healthy market. Horror hit Other Mommy opened to twenty-seven point five million dollars domestically, and Sony's Resident Evil has passed three hundred and twenty million dollars worldwide, according to Screen Daily.

So the Digger box office slump is not a sign that people stopped going to the movies. It is a sign that people stopped going to this one, and that is a much more specific problem for the studio and its star.

Not everything is doom. According to Deadline, the domestic box office has crossed eight billion dollars for the year, up nearly twenty percent from the same point in 2025. Audiences are clearly showing up, just not for everything.

The lesson for studios seems simple: a huge budget and a famous face are no longer enough. Horror made on a small budget keeps printing money, while pricey prestige swings can crater. For Gen Z moviegoers deciding where to spend a ticket, that says a lot about what actually gets people into seats.