Digger Opened to About $8 Million, and It Is Tom Cruise's Weakest Start in Almost 20 Years

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Digger, the dark satire Alejandro G. Inarritu made with Tom Cruise, opened to roughly $8 million in the United States and Canada, with about another $12 million from 73 international markets. That puts the worldwide start near $20 million. Trade reports call it Cruise's weakest opening in almost two decades, since Lions for Lambs started at $6.7 million in 2007.

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The money side is the painful part. Reports put the production budget somewhere between $125 million and $135 million, and one outlet projects a loss for Warner Bros. of around $150 million once marketing is counted. Those are reported figures, not studio statements, so I would treat the exact loss as an estimate. The same weekend, Verity took first place with $32.6 million, which tells you how much of the audience went elsewhere.

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Reviews were split rather than uniformly bad. Some critics called it wild and divisive and said it is nothing like what the trailers promised, while others were savage, with one Spanish critic calling it a pretentious, hysterical spectacle. On Letterboxd it sits around 3.8 out of 5, which is a healthier number than the box office suggests.

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Cruise has not retreated. He told interviewers he is proud of what the team made, and Inarritu has spoken about the hostile reviews too. I like that a star with this much power spent it on a strange, difficult film, even if the public said no. Plenty of films that lost money on opening weekend are the ones people argue about for years.

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Tom Cruise's Digger opened to about $8 million in the US and $20 million worldwide, his weakest start in nearly 20 years, with divided reviews.

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I have not seen it yet, and I will try to before judging it fairly. A $135 million satire was always going to be a hard sell. Are you planning to see Digger in a cinema, or will you wait for streaming?digger-tom-cruise-inarritu-box-office-worst-opening