Warner Bros. bet big on Tom Cruise and director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, but the studio’s roughly $250 million wager on Digger is shaping up as one of the year’s most expensive misfires. According to Breitbart’s John Nolte, the film opened to a dismal $8 million despite a wide release in more than 3,300 theaters — a debut that Nolte described as a “historical flop.”
The math on the project looks punishing. Nolte reports the production budget was rumored to be around $180 million, with a marketing and promotion spend that “must have grazed at least $70 million.” That puts the total outlay near a quarter of a billion dollars before a single ticket was sold.
Audiences Give It a C+
Whatever hopes the studio had for word-of-mouth rescuing the film were dealt a severe blow by its Cinemascore. The audience polling firm handed Digger a C+, a grade Nolte characterized as “absolutely dreadful” and typically a signal of a quick, painful slide down the box office chart.
For context, Nolte noted that other recent underperformers — Novacaine, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Nobody 2, and M3Gan 2.0 — all managed to open above $8 million. Digger couldn’t clear that low bar.
Some estimates for the opening weekend came in even lower than the $8 million figure, according to the report.
Where the Losses Could Land
If the historical pattern holds, Nolte wrote, Digger‘s domestic run could sputter out before reaching $20 million. That trajectory, he suggested, would leave Warner Bros. staring at losses in the neighborhood of $150 million — a hole that would be difficult to climb out of through ancillary revenue alone.
The film’s poor reception comes despite — or perhaps because of — its overt political messaging. Digger is built around a “bombastic attack” on the oil industry, Nolte wrote, a framing he argued alienated the broader moviegoing public that has grown weary of being lectured.
A Premature ‘Reassessment’
What has surprised Nolte is not just the box office failure but the immediate critical defensiveness that followed it. He pointed out that movies are typically “reassessed” years or even decades after release, once they find a second life on television or through home video sales. Instead, he wrote, some corners of Film Twitter are already rushing to reframe Digger‘s collapse as something other than what the numbers show.
That reflexive defense, in Nolte’s telling, reflects a broader disconnect between the entertainment industry and the audience it depends on. He argued that the industry is “so out of touch, so hostile toward Normal People, and so unwilling to get back in touch” that the only rational response is to shake your head and appreciate your own Blu-Ray collection.
Who Was This For?
The most confounding question, Nolte wrote, is one of audience targeting. The biggest movie star in the world is buried under heavy prosthetics, and the trailer comes across as “bombastic and unpleasant.” A niche art-house release with a modest $25 million budget might have made sense for that kind of material, he suggested — but not a $250 million studio tentpole.
Nolte framed the failure as part of a broader pattern in which Hollywood declines to make comedies or religious films that mainstream audiences enjoy, refuses to give viewers classic heroes, and instead spends enormous sums on projects that seem designed to antagonize the very people who buy tickets.
The result, he concluded, is a business model built on “lunacy and hate” — one that, as Digger‘s opening weekend demonstrates, is not a profitable proposition.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/10/03/nolte-tom-cruises-climate-screed-digger-opens-to-8m-deadly-c-cinemascore/