Digger Box Office: Why Tom Cruise’s Movie Bombed

Digger’s $20 Million Opening Puts One of 2026’s Biggest Films on Track for a Huge Loss

Tom Cruise’s new film Digger opened to $20 million worldwide despite its star power and reported $125 million production budget.

There was a time when having Tom Cruise in a film was enough to make people want to see it in the cinemas. Digger was supposed to test just how much of that power remains when you take away the familiar franchise, the impossible stunt and the character audiences already know.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s R-rated original film opened to just $8 million in North America and $12 million internationally, giving it a $20 million global start after its October 2, 2026 release. That is a difficult opening for a film that reportedly cost at least $125 million to produce, with another $100 million estimated to have gone into marketing.

So, how did a movie starring one of Hollywood’s biggest stars end up here?

Digger Put Tom Cruise’s Star Power to the Test

Let’s start with what made Digger different: Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a wealthy oil tycoon whose actions contribute to a global environmental disaster. Instead of running from explosions or piloting a fighter jet, he is playing an eccentric, morally questionable businessman in a dark satire directed by an Oscar-winning filmmaker. Warner Bros. describes it as an “original film”, and the studio released it exclusively in cinemas and IMAX.

This is important because Cruise has spent much of the past decade reinforcing a very specific relationship with audiences. His biggest recent successes have come from Mission: Impossible and Top Gun. Top Gun: Maverick opened to $126.7 million domestically and eventually made nearly $1.5 billion worldwide. Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning opened to $64 million domestically in 2025 and finished with almost $600 million worldwide.

You can now see that these films gave audiences something familiar before Cruise even appeared on screen. They knew who Ethan Hunt was. They knew what Top Gun promised. Digger had none of that. It asked audiences to take a chance on an expensive, R-rated satire that looked deliberately strange.