Tom Cruise’s New $200M Movie Is Officially One of His Worst Box Office Debuts

Published Oct 3, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT

Rohan Naahar is a News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he’ll watch anything once. He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.

It’s an unfortunate weekend in the history of movies — “the last movie star,” Tom Cruise, is struggling to pull audiences to theaters, and the historic Warner Bros. is no more. Cruise’s name shall always be intertwined in the studio’s history, as his ambitious new film, Digger, is the final release in the studio’s history as an independent entity. It will soon be rebranded, along with Paramount, as the Skydance Corporation. Digger’s release also marks the end of studio chiefs Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca’s tenure at the company, according to a recent Puck report. Amid all the action, the movie itself is poised to become a historic box-office bomb, with actual opening numbers falling short of even the most pessimistic projections.

Directed by the two-time Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñarritu, Digger was marketed as Cruise’s long-awaited return to non-IP filmmaking — a movie that could win him an elusive acting Oscar. Early marketing material highlighted Cruise’s career, while more recent assets have made a desperate bid to play up the satirical epic’s divisive response. None of it has worked. The movie is currently sitting at a 52% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “A stylized satire whose audacious design proves too mannered for some of the laughs to smoothly land, Digger is a bold swing of the shovel by Tom Cruise and Alejandro González Iñárritu that misses as often as it strikes gold.”

Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours. Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from

Your nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the conversation is.

Your nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on.

Your nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time.

Your nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way.

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