The initial teaser was intriguing. The first trailer planted seeds of doubt. The studio's refusal to put it on the festival circuit was frankly worrisome. The final trailer kept me away from the movie theater over the weekend. And I was hardly alone. Tom Cruise's first post-Mission: Impossible outing, Digger, dug down to a dismal $8 million opening weekend, despite appearing on more than 3,000 screens.
Co-written and directed by Oscar-winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant), the film stars Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an aging oil man who is both the cause of and self-proclaimed savior from some global ecological disaster.
On the off chance you do want to see Digger on the big screen, you might want to hurry. Theater owners won't want this stinker crowding their multiplexes for long. I did the math (myself!), and at an average ticket price of $13, each of the 3,321 screens Digger was on only had 185 butts in seats for the entire weekend.
To put it in perspective, here's Eric Childress from Rotten Tomatoes: "There have only been three films that cost at least that much to be released in over 3,000 theaters and failed to pull off a $10 million opening from Friday to Sunday. The most recent was Moonfall in 2022 ($9.86 million). The lowest was the animated Mars Needs Moms in 2011. Digger is the third."
Mars Needs Moms? Really?
Ouch.
The weird part is that while audiences failed to show up for Digger, those who did mostly liked it. Critics aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a tepid 51% Fresh — AKA "Rotten" — but audiences came in at a more respectable 72% Fresh. Maybe this one will have legs on streaming and home video.
But the box office failure is even more painful when you remember a couple of things to gain real perspective. The first is that Moonfall's $9.86 million would be about $11.3 million today — meaning that in constant dollars, Tom Cruise underperformed Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson by nearly a third.
The other is that Moonfall wasn't just bad; it was bad and terribly, obviously, and then even more terribly stupid. It was stupid even by the only sometimes entertainingly stupid standards of director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, 2012).
That is what Cruise did worse than this weekend.
TOM. CRUISE.
Although, to be fair, Cruise is unrecognizable (a feature, not a bug, they assure me) as Rockwell, wearing old-man makeup, a fat suit, and a Bill Cosby sweater. Digger, it should be noted, is much more of an Iñárritu piece of cinema than it is a Cruise flick.
Which brings us to our almost (but not quite) "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" moment for Yours Truly.
Originally billed as a "comedy of catastrophic proportions," the movie's teaser helped inspire me to write an entire Thursday Essay titled "Will the Real Tom Cruise Please Star in This Picture?"
The gist of the piece was that there are two Tom Cruises. The first is the "last true Hollywood star" who makes big-budget spectacles, and who never leaves the house without having his public persona covering him from head to toe. The second is the teen actor who basically willed himself into becoming a damn fine adult actor over a number of years, and who makes interesting choices.
"As much as I enjoy those movie star pictures, I can't help but think he's made enough of them," I wrote in February, "and that I'd trade all the future big-budget franchise flicks for a few more unexpected parts like Jerry Maguire or whoever the hell Digger Rockwell turns out to be."
Sadly, Digger turned out to be a big old box-office dud.
But that doesn't mean Cruise shouldn't take more chances. There's a fine actor under all the makeup and behind all the stunts, and I still hope we get to see him more often.
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