Tom Cruise’s new film Digger is shaping up as one of the year’s most expensive misfires, according to a Breitbart Entertainment column by John Nolte. The Alejandro Iñárritu-directed, climate-change-themed drama — which Nolte describes as a “129-minute attack” on oil consumers — is tracking for an $8 million to $12 million wide opening across the United States, a figure that would put the film on course to lose more than $100 million if current projections hold.
Warner Bros. reportedly sank between $160 million and $180 million into production alone, a sum that does not include the studio’s marketing spend. Nolte estimates promotion could push the total outlay toward $250 million, which would require roughly $500 million in worldwide box office just to break even. At the projected opening pace, that threshold appears very far out of reach.
A Rough Reception, Even From Friendly Critics
What makes the numbers sting more, per Nolte, is that the negative reviews are not coming exclusively from the right. He notes that Digger currently holds a 52 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes — a “rotten” score — and argues that when left-leaning critics pan an overtly left-leaning film, it is a meaningful signal, because those reviewers, in his framing, typically extend a generous curve to politically sympathetic projects.
Nolte points to a review published at RogerEbert.com, which he characterizes in blunt terms, quoting the critic’s description of the film as “devoid of substance.” The reviewer questioned the movie’s construction, asking why so much of its runtime is built around watching what the critic called a bad, unfunny play, and observing that “the longer Iñárritu takes to get to the bottom of his film, the bigger the hole he digs becomes.” The review also suggests the film strays from its own initial points to the degree that its intentions become difficult to identify.
Christian Toto, a conservative film critic, is quoted at length in the Breitbart piece. Toto describes “endless speeches, most involving the horrors of Climate Change and how dern evil oil is,” and singles out an extended close-up in which Cruise’s character “rants, raves and reveals the truth about oil and culture” — a monologue that, in Toto’s summary, insists that “we need it. We crave it. We’ll risk everything to burn it. So this is all our fault.” Toto’s verdict is equally harsh: he calls the film “bloated, dull, obvious, utterly lacking in self-awareness and, yes, exhausting,” and asks whether audiences would want to spend two hours with grown men screaming at the top of their lungs.
The Broader Argument
Nolte frames Digger as part of a wider pattern rather than an isolated flop. He describes it as a movie “designed in a Woke Lab” to appeal to critics and claims that it instead “shames us for our standard of living, which is a direct result of the oil industry and the miracle of the free market, and uses the hoax of global warming as its cudgel.”
That characterization extends into a broader cultural argument in the column, in which Nolte contrasts the film’s reception with what he sees as the priorities of other institutions, and reiterates his enthusiasm for artificial intelligence as a tool that could put film and television production directly in the hands of ordinary people. The piece reads less as a box office report than as a case study in what Nolte views as the widening disconnect between Hollywood’s political instincts and the audience it depends on.
Whether the final numbers match the projections is, of course, still open. Opening-weekend tracking is an estimate, not a result, and a film’s global run can diverge sharply from its domestic debut — particularly for a star of Cruise’s international pull. But the combination of a nine-figure production budget, a marketing campaign of similar scale, and a critics’ score hovering near the middle of the scale leaves Digger with very little margin for error.
For Warner Bros., the stakes are straightforward. A loss in the range Nolte outlines would be one of the more expensive write-downs of the year and would land squarely on a studio already navigating a turbulent period in the theatrical business. For Cruise, whose recent output has been defined by franchise spectacle rather than director-driven prestige drama, the outcome may inform how he balances the two going forward.
The film opens wide across America this weekend, when the projections will either be confirmed or overturned by actual ticket sales.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/09/30/nolte-tom-cruises-global-warming-propaganda-digger-about-to-lose-100-million/