Warner Bros.’ new Tom Cruise film “Digger” opened to a dismal $28 million worldwide last weekend, putting the studio on track for one of the biggest losses in recent box office history.
The film pulled in just $8 million domestically and $20 million internationally in its debut, according to industry figures. Cruise stars as an oil executive whose business triggers an environmental catastrophe, a premise built around climate-change messaging that critics say audiences simply didn’t want.
The numbers behind the production make the opening even worse. Trade reports put the film’s marketing spend alone at $100 million on top of its production budget, meaning Warner Bros. needs the movie to gross roughly $300 million just to break even by that math. But the standard industry rule is that a film must earn about double its total budget to turn a profit, which puts the real break-even point for “Digger” somewhere between $500 million and $600 million.
At its current pace, the film isn’t projected to crack $100 million worldwide, leaving Warner Bros. staring at a potential loss of $150 million to $200 million. That would place “Digger” in the same company as Disney’s infamous 2012 flop “John Carter.”
The film had been positioned as Cruise’s long-awaited awards-season vehicle, the project many in Hollywood expected to finally land him an Oscar. Instead, it’s shaping up as one of the costliest failures of his career.
Even the movie’s defenders have offered lukewarm praise at best, with reactions ranging from “it’s not that bad” to acknowledgments that it’s an admirable creative swing rather than a genuinely good film. That has not translated into ticket sales.
Warner Bros. spent somewhere between $250 million and $280 million producing and promoting the film. Industry observers are now asking who greenlit a budget that size for a project built around a heavy-handed political message and marketing that failed to generate excitement from the moment the first trailer dropped.
