Digger Opens to $8 Million and Closes a Studio Era

Tom Cruise’s climate satire Digger opened to $8 million in North America, his weakest start since 2007, and the last film Warner Bros. will release as its own studio. It played in 3,321 theaters, added $12 million from 74 overseas markets, and reached only $20 million worldwide against a production cost that insiders put between $160 million and $180 million.

The Paramount deal that folds Warner Bros. into Skydance closes on Tuesday, October 6. Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, the film chiefs who greenlit the movie without reading the script, have already been told they will not stay.

$8 Million From 3,321 Theaters

Amazon MGM’s Verity, a Colleen Hoover adaptation with Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, led the weekend with $32.6 million from 3,510 theaters. Holdovers did the rest of the damage, and Digger finished fifth.

THE OPENING WEEKEND AROUND DIGGER

On a per-theater basis Digger took in about $2,409, while Verity took in about $9,293. Thursday previews contributed $1.2 million of Digger’s $3.4 million Friday, after which the film slipped to $2.6 million on Saturday and $2 million on Sunday, matching the weekend totals on the daily chart. Verity added $62.5 million worldwide in the same span, more than three times Digger’s global haul.

Warner Bros. had been hoping for $18 million to $20 million. Public tracking a week earlier sat at $12 million to $15 million, then kept falling. A Friday projection of $10 million was cut again on Saturday morning. Overseas crowds, who usually underwrite Cruise, did not show either.

Iñárritu Waited a Decade for a Crowd That Stayed Home

Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the director of Birdman and The Revenant, first locked onto the character after The Revenant in 2015. He has said he was not hunting a plot so much as a way to say something he already knew by heart.

I had an idea. Not a script, not a film, just a relentless, recurring obsession that has endured through all these years. I knew who this character was. I knew how he spoke, how he survived, how he seduced reality into agreeing with him. But it took me 10 years to do this film, because I wasn’t looking for a story. I was looking for the right way of saying it.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu, director and co-writer

Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a Texas oil tycoon whose company drills in Greenland, ignores methane under the field, and watches an ice shelf the size of Maryland break free and drift toward Europe. Riz Ahmed is Dr. Nirav Ganesh, the environmental safety chief who has been warning him. John Goodman is President Compson. Sandra Hüller is Emma Rockwell, the half-sister with a cleaner brand. A grandfather’s shovel from a 1917 strike hangs on the wall like a relic.

Then the film tells you that Rockwell is also Curtis Markson, an actor in a stage satire titled Fossil Fools, and that the disaster you have been watching is a dress rehearsal. Iñárritu has called Cruise’s 10-minute monologue the spine of the picture and said the writers ran through maybe 70 versions of it over nine years. He also said he was not interested in turning the movie into a left-or-right lecture. “We are all part of this madness,” he told interviewers while the film was still being sold as a mystery.

Legendary Pictures produced with Warner Bros. Emmanuel Lubezki shot it on 35 mm VistaVision at Pinewood Studios from November 7, 2024, to May 3, 2025. The makeup that turns Cruise into a balding, padded tycoon started at six hours a session; Cruise put a stopwatch on the chair and got it under an hour. Runtime is 129 minutes. The rating is R, for pervasive language. Critics split down the middle, with a Metacritic score of 45 from 56 critics. Manohla Dargis called it a “lumbering white elephant of a movie that almost makes you feel sorry for everyone involved.” Peter Howell put the performance up with Tropic Thunder and Magnolia. Both things can be true, and neither filled seats.

The Studio Chiefs Did Not Read the Script

De Luca and Abdy have run Warner Bros. film since 2022, and their bet was expensive original work from directors who could not get those budgets elsewhere. Cruise later praised them for greenlighting Digger without needing to turn a page. Puck and later studio accounts put the greenlight at $125 million. Production ran long, and the bill moved to $160 million to $180 million.

FROM GREENLIGHT TO THE LAST WEEKEND

1. February 2024: Cruise is cast after talks that began while he was shooting Top Gun: Maverick, with Legendary Pictures producing and Warner Bros. distributing.
2. November 7, 2024: Principal photography starts at Pinewood under the working title Judy, with Lubezki on camera.
3. May 3, 2025: Shooting wraps after six months, including a two-day halt while Goodman has hip surgery.
4. September 22, 2026: The film premieres at Leicester Square in London; Mexico opens October 1, the United States and Britain on October 2.
5. October 2, 2026: Opening day in the United States, and the day Ellison reaches De Luca and Abdy to confirm they are out, after they first saw the news in Thursday night reports.
6. October 6, 2026: The Paramount deal is set to close, their last day, and the first day of the combined company operating as Skydance.

Some of those auteur bets paid. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners was a hit, even after the studio flinched at returning him the copyright. Zack Cregger’s Weapons made money too. The next wave did not. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is already counted among the decade’s heavy losses. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another opened to $22 million after $3 million in previews, won Best Picture, and still wrote down about $100 million. A Paramount executive, talking about that film, put the incoming mandate in one line: “We don’t lose $100 million to win Best Picture.” People who follow original films like to say they want more of them. This weekend they did not buy tickets for one.

Why Did Digger Open to $8 Million?

Digger opened to $8 million because an R-rated original about a prosthetic oil tycoon, sold as a Cruise event and then as a dare, could not convert either the Maverick crowd or the cinephile one. Reviews were mixed, multiplex grades were poor, and the campaign spent its last week arguing with its own notices.

WHAT KEPT PEOPLE AWAY

• The notices: Rotten Tomatoes posted 51 percent of 259 critics’ reviews as fresh, with a consensus that the “bold swing of the shovel” misses as often as it hits.
• Opening-night grades: CinemaScore gave it a C+, the same mark Lions for Lambs got in 2007, and PostTrak found that only 47 percent of surveyed moviegoers would definitely recommend it.
• The sell: After the reviews landed, the studio shifted to “decide for yourself” spots built around Rockwell snapping, “You know what? Fuck those people,” a move already used on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.
• The disguise: Cruise is balding, padded, and Southern in the ads, which is the point of the performance and a rotten way to harvest Top Gun walk-up.
• The format: A 129-minute R-rated original comedy from Iñárritu is a hard multiplex sell even when the star is the most famous actor still working in theaters.

Iñárritu planned the misdirection from the start, saying he wanted people surprised and that the trailers had to ask “What is this about?” without answering. Cruise, at a post-screening talk, pushed the handmade sets. “Everything is practical,” he said. “It was so beautiful, and I just have to say … AI can’t do that.” On Saturday he posted that he was “so proud of what we created,” and he did not mention the gross. Pride is allowed. It is also not a distribution plan.

Lions for Lambs Opened Lower on a $35 Million Budget

The last Cruise film to open softer was Lions for Lambs, the 2007 Robert Redford political drama that debuted at $6.7 million. That movie cost $35 million and finished at $63.2 million worldwide, a disappointment that did not threaten a studio. Nineteen years later the opening is in the same neighborhood and the outlay is not.

The Mummy, in 2017, is the closer cousin on loss. It opened at $32 million domestically, reached about $410 million worldwide, and still dropped an estimated $95 million, enough to kill Universal’s Dark Universe before a second film. Digger’s worldwide start is $20 million, and it does not have a mummy brand to lean on overseas. Top Gun: Maverick, the movie Cruise was shooting when Iñárritu first pitched him, opened at $126.7 million. That is the business he has been in. This is not.

THE HOLE IN THE LEDGER

• Official budget: Warner Bros. greenlit Digger at $125 million, then watched production delays push the true cost to $160 million to $180 million.
• Marketing: The studio spent another $100 million globally to sell it, including IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and VistaVision dates that ended The Odyssey’s 70 mm IMAX run.
• Break-even: Warner Bros. has put the theatrical break-even at $300 million; executives counting prints, ads, and the exhibitors’ cut put the real target nearer $350 million.
• The loss: Two executives with knowledge of the finances put the hit at $150 million or more, and Cruise’s first-dollar gross deal means the studio recoups even more slowly.

Theaters keep about half of ticket sales. At $8 million domestic, that is roughly $4 million back to the studio before overseas splits. A Warner Bros. spokesperson declined to comment. There is not much to spin. Awards voters can still find the monologue, the Lubezki images, and the go-for-broke turn. They cannot change the opening.

Tuesday Ends Warner Bros. as a Standalone Studio

Digger is the final Warner Bros. release before Paramount’s deal for Warner Bros. Discovery is due to close on Tuesday, October 6. The combined company will operate under the Skydance name. David Ellison, the incoming co-CEO, is keeping Paramount film chiefs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein over both lots. That structure collides with De Luca and Abdy’s contract, which runs through 2030 and has them reporting to the CEO, with marketing and distribution under them.

They had expected to keep steering the 39 dated films they are handing over, part of a combined slate of about 70 titles stretching into 2029. An antitrust settlement that cleared the $111 billion takeover binds Skydance to at least 30 theatrical movies a year. Ellison is also staring at about $80 billion in debt. The pair learned they were out from Thursday night reports, then took his call on Friday, the same day Digger opened. Talks of producing deals at the new company are in the air. Reporting to Goldberg and Greenstein is not the job they signed.

Good luck to you. I left you 39 movies.

Pamela Abdy, outgoing Warner Bros. film chief, to David Ellison

Whether that slate looks more like Sinners than Digger is now Goldberg and Greenstein’s problem. De Luca and Abdy were the most director-friendly chiefs in town, the people who gave Iñárritu, Anderson, Gyllenhaal, and Coogler the kind of money they would have had to beg for elsewhere. Sometimes the bet came back. This year, according to people around the lot, not one film they put into development has crossed $100 million domestic. Digger did not arrive in a vacuum. It arrived as the exhibit.

A 30-Movie Mandate Leaves Little Room for This

Cruise already knows Ellison. He made Top Gun: Maverick and several Mission: Impossible films with Skydance, and he has blessed the merger in public. On Pat McAfee’s show he called the combined company a community, not an industry, and said it would deliver 30 movies.

“They’re going to deliver 30 movies. It’s a community to me. It’s not an industry. The people in these studios are not just people in the studios, they’re my family,” Cruise said. “I know we’re going to get those 30 movies. I want us all to come together as a community to help make those 30 movies. It’s not just going to be Paramount doing it. Everyone’s going to need all the help of every artist to be able to do it.”

He can mean that. He can also mean Days of Thunder 2. The 30-movie floor is a legal promise, not a promise of another unread $125 million satire about a man who jumps into the ocean after scattering his cat’s ashes. Cruise went for broke in a way he mostly abandoned while playing an action hero, and the people who signed the check are leaving with him. Iñárritu got the canvas he had wanted since The Revenant. The multiplex, looking at an unrecognizable movie star in an R-rated play-within-a-play, stayed home. On Tuesday the studio that paid for that canvas stops existing as a standalone company, and the next 30 movies will be someone else’s to greenlight, preferably after they read them.