Early on, it looked like Digger, the latest Tom Cruise movie that hit the 2026 movie schedule last weekend, would be a box office flop. So, I wasn’t surprised to see it fail, but I’m still shocked that a Tom Cruise movie is doing this poorly with moviegoers. Cruise is one of the rare Hollywood superstars who almost always guarantees a big opening and a big hit. The Mission: Impossible actor sells most movies just on his name alone. That name doesn’t seem able to overcome lackluster reviews for the Alejandro González Iñárritu-directed film.
Teaming Up With A Great Director
To be clear, Digger isn’t a typical Tom Cruise movie, and I should note that I haven’t seen it yet. I haven’t seen it due to a confluence of events in my life that means I just haven’t had a chance to get to the theater to watch it, but I’m not here to condemn or defend the movie; I'm here to talk about just how shocking it is that it is such a massive box office miss. Cruise rarely misses, and to bomb at this level, both with critics and at the box office, basically never happens.
He’s teamed up on Digger with one of the best directors in the business. Iñárritu has won four Oscars, including Best Director for Birdman and The Revenant, and always seems to make interesting pictures. This one looks that way too, and maybe that is the problem? It’s hard to say, but I was excited to see Cruise step out of the action genre for the first time in a while and sink his teeth into an interesting role. I guess audiences weren’t as keen as I am.
Losses On An Historic Level?
Not every Cruise-led film reaches the heights (no pun intended) of Top Gun: Maverick or the Mission: Impossible franchise, but they basically always at least make their money back and more. That’s far from the case with Digger, which, as of Friday, October 9th, has only brought in $29 million worldwide, after a meek $8 opening weekend in the U.S., according to Box Office Mojo. That’s on a reported budget of somewhere between $160 and $180 million, per Variety, though numbers are hard to pin down on the actual cost of Digger. Either way, it’s on pace to be one of the worst-performing Tom Cruise movies of all time.
Digger could very well become the most notorious flop of the actor’s career, overtaking The Mummy, and I really did not see that coming. I wasn’t all in on Digger ranking in money on the level of, say, War of the Worlds, but some in the media are already calling Digger one of the biggest busts of all time. It’s set to follow up its really poor opening weekend performance with a massive drop-off in its second weekend, well behind this weekend’s winners like Other Mommy, The Social Reckoning, and Verity in its second weekend.
The good news for Cruise is that this will likely just be a blip on his career, with his next movies likely being sequels, one for the legendary Days of Thunder and a third movie in the Top Gun franchise. It only goes up from here!
