Tom Cruise’s Divisive New Movie Officially Ends His Box Office Winning Streak

Published Oct 4, 2026, 12:00 PM 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.

Three holdover hits — Resident Evil, Heart of the Beast, and Primetime — managed to outperform the divisive new movie starring Tom Cruise, Digger. Directed by two-time Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the satirical epic is shaping up to be a historic bomb, and the circumstances surrounding its release seem appropriately dour. Digger is the final movie in Warner Bros.’ century-long run as an independent entity, and the last to be released under the leadership of the dismissed studio chiefs Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca. Produced on a budget that has been reported to be anywhere between $140 million and $180 million, the movie was projected as an Oscar play for Cruise, but its mixed critical reception and disastrous box-office results may dent his chances.

Also featuring Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jesse Plemons, the film follows an oil magnate whose recklessness causes a global catastrophe. The film currently holds 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.” Audiences gave it a C+ grade on CinemaScore, which pretty much spells doom.

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You have quietly arranged your life so that very little can get to you, and a surprising number of people find that infuriating. You would be completely at

You talk your way through life and it works far more often than it should. Give you a bad situation and an audience and you will find a way out of both at

You would survive Fargo because you are the only kind of person who does: patient, decent, and completely unimpressed by anybody trying to be clever.

You do not expect the world to be fair and you stopped being surprised about it a long time ago. That clear-eyed quality is exactly what this film asks

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