Digger Box Office Bombs Despite Tom Cruise Star Power

The Digger box office story is the kind of Hollywood faceplant nobody saw coming: Tom Cruise, one of the last true movie stars, fronting a climate satire that audiences are mostly skipping. After a single week in cinemas, the film is being talked about as a monumental flop.

A Cruise movie with a very un-Cruise opening

Digger is a climate-change satire from Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu, and it gives Cruise a rare villain role as oil tycoon Digger Rockwell. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the film opened on three hundred and thirty-five screens in Australia and took just seven hundred and ninety-one thousand dollars over the weekend, finishing eighth.

That is almost inconceivably bad for a Cruise film, as the paper puts it. For comparison, Brad Pitt's Heart of the Beast made nearly twice as much in its second weekend on a similar number of screens, and the weekend's top film, Verity, pulled in three and a half million dollars.

The numbers in the United States

The American picture is no kinder. The Sydney Morning Herald reports Digger opened to about seven and a half million US dollars, against a production budget reported somewhere between one hundred and twenty-five million and one hundred and eighty million.

The paper adds that it is already predicted to be one of the biggest financial disasters in the business in decades. That lands in a year when cinema has been regaining its mojo thanks to hits like The Odyssey and the latest Spider-Man film, which makes the Digger box office result stand out even more.

Critics on both sides hated it

Here is the weird part: the pile-on is bipartisan. In a commentary for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, senior fellow Leonardo Martinez-Diaz notes reviewers on the right have called it a failed conceit and farcical and dull, while climate-minded critics called it the most disappointing film of the year and a mess of shrieking and spittle.

Even two culture writers at the Herald could not agree. One loved the first twenty minutes of Cruise going full camp, with a potbelly, a bald spot and a creepy fingernail. The other argued the humour just was not funny, and that Cruise is not a natural comedian.

The fourth-wall twist that split viewers

The film keeps pulling its frame back. First it looks like a movie about a greedy oilman, then it is a movie about a play about him, and finally it reveals a near-future world where climate failure has already caused real catastrophe. One reviewer called the final scene a masterstroke. The other said the meta storytelling turned the movie into a heavy-handed lecture.

Plenty of people simply do not want two hours of being told we are all complicit and doomed. As one of the Herald writers admitted, it is a bleak one, and no wonder people are not lining up for tickets.

Why some experts say it still matters

Martinez-Diaz argues that the film may be the most influential and well-timed climate movie yet, despite the flop. He says it lays out what Carnegie calls New Denialism, the idea that climate change is real but decarbonization is unrealistic and we can just drill more and engineer our way out.

He also points to the film's focus on methane, quoting a character who says carbon dioxide is the trigger but methane is the bomb. According to Carnegie, methane traps about thirty times as much heat as carbon dioxide over a century. The third contribution, he says, is asking how we process ecological grief, something he notes is very real among younger generations.

What to watch next

Digger is still in cinemas, so the second weekend will show whether word of mouth helps or the numbers fall off a cliff. Either way, the conversation is already bigger than the ticket sales. Check our movies coverage for more on what is hitting screens.

For Gen Z, the film is a test of whether climate doom can sell as entertainment. The early Digger box office answer is a loud no, but the arguments it started suggest people are still chewing on what it says.

Sources: The Sydney Morning Herald and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.