Things have gone from bad to considerably worse for “Digger.” As The Playlist reported Sunday, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s expensive, deeply polarizing satire opened to just $8 million domestically and $20 million worldwide, giving Tom Cruise his worst opening since 2007’s “Lions for Lambs.” Now the financial postmortem has arrived, and the numbers are pretty brutal.
According to Deadline, “Digger” could lose Warner Bros. around $150 million once theatrical, home entertainment, and television revenues come into play. The trade estimates the movie will ultimately generate about $140 million in global revenue against roughly $290 million in production, marketing, distribution, and other costs.
Exactly how much “Digger” cost has become its own point of contention. Deadline puts the net production budget at around $125 million after tax credits, while other reports suggest the real number climbed much higher. Warner Bros. disputes those larger estimates. Variety reports that the production ultimately cost between $160 million and $180 million, with another $100 million spent on global marketing, and estimates the film is primed to lose at least $150 million to $200 million theatrically. Warner Bros. puts its worldwide break-even point at around $300 million, while executives familiar with comparable films tell Variety it is closer to $350 million. Either way, there’s really no version of the math where an $8 million domestic debut works for a movie this expensive.
The funny thing is that “Digger” was already the cheaper version of Iñárritu’s idea. As the filmmaker recently explained, he and Cruise nearly made an earlier incarnation years ago with a “massive” budget before it fell apart. They eventually came back to the project in a different form, even ditching its wonderfully ridiculous original title, “Blah, Blah, Blah,” along the way.
Cruise’s normally huge international appeal hasn’t rescued it, either. “Digger” took in only $12 million overseas during its opening weekend, a rough number for a star whose “Mission: Impossible” movies and “Top Gun: Maverick” have made international audiences such a massive part of their business.
There’s also some unfortunate timing to something Cruise said while promoting the movie. Just weeks ago, he lamented how little time movies now get in theaters, saying films increasingly get only “a weekend” to prove themselves. Well, “Digger” seemingly just had that weekend, and it’s now being discussed almost entirely in terms of how much money it stands to lose.
Of course, this was always an odd movie to carry blockbuster economics. Iñárritu has Cruise playing Digger Rockwell, a grotesque oil billionaire facing an ecological catastrophe of his own making, in an R-rated apocalyptic satire that’s big, loud, abrasive, and deliberately strange. It starts as an enormous farce, eventually reveals something much darker underneath, and asks Cruise to play against practically everything audiences expect from him. Nobody was making “Top Gun 3” here.
That’s also what makes the scale of Warner Bros.’ bet so fascinating. Whatever anyone thinks of the movie, “Digger” is a genuinely weird, filmmaker-driven studio swing made at a level where Hollywood rarely allows genuinely weird movies to exist anymore. Unfortunately, Warner Bros. may now have a $150 million reminder of why studios are so reluctant to make them.
Cruise, at least, isn’t running away from it. Following the disastrous opening, he said publicly that he remains “so proud of what we created,” praising Iñárritu and the cast and crew behind the movie.
“Digger” could still find a much longer life on PVOD and streaming, and a movie this bizarre will probably inspire arguments for years (read our review). But financially, the damage has been done. There’s something almost too perfect about a movie in which Cruise plays a billionaire desperately confronting a catastrophe of his own making, potentially leaving Warner Bros. with a $150 million crater.
