'Digger' Takes $1.2M in Thursday Previews, Eyes the Worst Wide Opening of Tom Cruise's Career

Tom Cruise has built a career on impossible missions that end with explosions and applause. This weekend, the impossible mission is simply getting people into the theater. Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger, the Warner Bros. satire starring Cruise as bombastic oil billionaire Digger Rockwell, took in just $1.2 million in Thursday previews — and tracking now suggests it may open below $12 million, which would make it the weakest wide opening of Cruise's career in decades.

The preview figure is especially grim in context. The film opened Friday in more than 3,300 North American locations, and rival executives had told the trades that a movie of this size needed a debut near $40 million to justify its cost. The official production budget is listed at $125 million, though multiple reports put the real number between $160 million and $180 million after production ran over schedule — a figure Warner Bros. disputes. With roughly $100 million in marketing on top, the break-even bar is said to sit somewhere near $300 million to $350 million worldwide.

A Fall From Tracking Highs

The collapse in expectations has been remarkably steady. Early NRG tracking had Digger opening as high as $20 million to $29 million. Then tracking slid to $19 million, then $18 million to $20 million, and finally Warner Bros. itself was projecting a $12 million to $15 million start — a range that already signaled disaster for a $160-million film. The latest forecasts put the ceiling at $8 million to $12 million, making a single-digit debut a real possibility.

Critics have not been able to save it, either. Reviews for Digger have been deeply divided, with some praising Cruise's ferocious, prosthetic-buried performance as the best work he has done in years and others calling the satire heavy-handed and exhausting. Either way, the divisiveness has not converted into curiosity at the box office, and the film's R rating and dense two-and-a-half-hour tone have limited its casual audience.

Why This Weekend Hurts Warner Bros. So Much

The timing could hardly be worse. Digger is the final Warner Bros. release as a standalone studio, arriving just days before the $110 billion Paramount merger is expected to close on October 6. It also opened the same week that word leaked that film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy will not be joining the merged company. A hit would have been a triumphant farewell; a $10-million opening is more like a footnote.

There is still one silver lining, if a thin one. Warner Bros. has leaned into the polarized response, rolling out new marketing that asks audiences to judge the film for themselves. Iñárritu's films have historically played long and benefited from awards-season oxygen, and Cruise has survived the likes of Lions for Lambs and Rock of Ages to return to the top. But with a $300-million-plus hill to climb from a sub-$12-million start, Digger is not so much digging for gold as digging itself out of a very deep hole.