Tom Cruise’s latest wide-release starring vehicle is off to a rough start. According to Breitbart’s John Nolte, the actor’s big-budget environmental satire Digger pulled in just $1.2 million during Thursday night previews — a number that has industry watchers bracing for one of the year’s most expensive flops.
The film, directed by two-time Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu and distributed by Warner Bros., reportedly carries a combined production and marketing price tag of roughly $250 million. Its opening weekend is now projected at $12 million to $15 million across 3,300 North American screens, per the Variety estimate Nolte cites.
Why the numbers are worse than they look
The $1.2 million Thursday figure is especially grim when stacked against comparable opening weekends. Nolte notes that other wide releases with similar Thursday preview hauls have all gone on to die at the box office. And none of those films had a star anywhere near Cruise’s box-office wattage.
The last time a Cruise-starring wide release opened below $12 million was 1992’s Far and Away, more than three decades ago. His worst Thursday preview performance prior to Digger was 2017’s American Made, which opened to $6.2 million, ultimately grossing $52 million domestically and $135 million worldwide.
Based on the current trajectory, Nolte writes he would be “very surprised” if Digger reaches even those modest totals. The R-rated film is currently tracking far below the $12–15 million opening that the industry had expected, and word-of-mouth from early reviews has been unkind.
A comparison to another infamous environmental allegory
Nolte draws a parallel between Digger and Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 film Mother!, the Jennifer Lawrence-led allegory about Mother Nature and the ravages of modernity. That film opened on roughly 2,400 screens to $7.53 million and eventually grossed $44 million worldwide. It also cost about one-sixth of what Digger did, and received better reviews.
Where Mother! at least attempted to tell its story through metaphor, Nolte argues, Digger is so aggressively on-the-nose that it may be difficult for audiences to stomach. That unsubtle approach, combined with a hefty budget and a marketing campaign that has emphasized the film’s climate messaging, appears to be driving away the very moviegoers Cruise has historically been able to count on.
The bigger question for Warner Bros. is not whether Digger will turn a profit — on these numbers, that seems all but impossible — but how steep the write-down will be. With a quarter-billion dollars in combined costs and a projected domestic opening in the low teens, the math is unforgiving.
For Cruise, who has spent the last several years as one of the last reliable theatrical draws in Hollywood thanks to the Mission: Impossible franchise and Top Gun: Maverick, the result marks an unusual stumble. Whether it represents a one-off misfire or something more significant about audience appetite for preachy tentpoles, the coming weekend’s final numbers will tell the tale.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/10/02/nolte-tom-cruises-climate-change-lecture-digger-doa-1-2m-thursday/