Tom Cruise’s Digger opens to $20m worldwide, risking up to $150m loss

Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Digger has flopped on its opening weekend, taking $20m worldwide. The result gives Tom Cruise one of the weakest debuts of his career.

The film made $8m in North America and $12m internationally across 74 markets. Amazon MGM’s Verity led the US box office with a $32.6m opening.

Production costs and potential losses

Digger cost at least $125m to produce. Some reports have placed the production budget near $150m, while marketing is estimated at a further $100m, leaving the film facing potentially substantial losses.

Expectations for the opening were revised down in the week before release. Warner Bros also ran “decide for yourself” advertising after largely negative reviews.

A failed awards-season contender

The film had been positioned as a possible awards-season heavyweight. Its release timing echoed last year’s One Battle After Another, which grossed $213.2m worldwide and won the Academy Award for best picture.

Critics mostly dismissed Digger as a strained climate-change satire, although Cruise’s performance was received more warmly. Audiences gave the film a “C+” CinemaScore.

Paramount’s Warner Bros takeover

The weak opening comes as Paramount Skydance completes its acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery. A US district court approved the $110bn deal last Wednesday, and Paramount said the merger would close on Tuesday; large-scale layoffs are expected.

Film consultant David A Gross said the new management — David Ellison, Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg — would decide what kind of films Warner Bros makes, suggesting the studio’s big-budget auteur strategy could be ending.

For Cruise, this is his most prominent setback since the 2017 remake of The Mummy, which grossed $409.2m worldwide against a $195m budget. The 64-year-old actor has spent much of the past decade leading Mission: Impossible films and Top Gun: Maverick.

Avengers Endgame: Encore fell to seventh place but lifted its worldwide total to $2.9255bn, narrowly overtaking Avatar at $2.9237bn.

Verity tops the US box office

Michael Showalter’s Verity stars Dakota Johnson as a writer hired to ghostwrite a series for an incapacitated author played by Anne Hathaway.