Anne Hathaway Gives Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ 5 Stars in Her First-Ever Letterboxd Review, Calls It ‘Brilliant’

The Digger hive has gained its most powerful ally yet. Anne Hathaway posted her first-ever review on Letterboxd this week — and chose Tom Cruise’s box-office casualty as the debut pick, awarding it a full five stars and calling it “brilliant.”

LOS ANGELES — On Oct. 7, Hathaway published her first review on the movie-centric social platform, giving Cruise’s new release Digger a five-star rating and urging other users to see the film for themselves, People reported. “I loved this brilliant movie,” the Oscar-winning actress wrote. “It’s smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious.” She encouraged viewers to make time for it and decide for themselves what they make of it — adding her own verdict: “For me? 10/10.”

It is a remarkably full-throated endorsement for a film that has had a brutal two weeks. Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and released Oct. 2, opened to an estimated $8 million domestically after mixed reviews — one of the weakest debuts of Cruise’s career, described by one outlet as his softest opening since 2007’s Lions for Lambs. Just Jared reported the film could lose up to $200 million for Warner Bros. The film’s Rotten Tomatoes score sits in the low 50s among critics, rising to the low 70s with audiences, with a C+ CinemaScore and a 45 out of 100 on Metacritic, per Comic Basics. It’s the rare big-budget misfire that has split critics, audiences, and box-office watchers in nearly equal measure.

What makes Hathaway’s timing so striking is that she had a direct stake in the same weekend. Her own film, Verity — the Colleen Hoover adaptation co-starring Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett — opened on the same day as Digger and handily outgrossed it, earning $32 million domestically in its opening weekend, Entertainment Weekly reported. That’s a four-to-one drubbing of her future co-star’s film, by her own film, on the same weekend — and her response was to publicly champion the loser. Digger also trailed the third weekend of Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil and the second weekend of David Ayer’s Heart of the Beast, EW noted, intensifying the scrutiny of its commercial prospects.

But Hathaway isn’t going out on a limb alone. She’s joined a genuinely heavyweight roster of industry defenders: Ron Howard, Guillermo del Toro and Glen Powell have all praised the divisive film, EW reported. Del Toro praised its scale, ambition and theatrical scope, calling it daring and cinematically complex; Howard lauded Cruise’s performance and the film’s twists, urging viewers to see it and reflect on it, while Powell added his voice to a growing chorus defending the picture’s boldness even as debate rages over its tone and ending. IndieWire’s Anne Thompson called it a brave and gorgeous art film that mainstream audiences might not embrace but that could play well with Academy voters.

The film itself is a climate-crisis satire with two huge twists that reshape everything you think you know about it. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a powerful oil tycoon whose arrogance and greed trigger a global catastrophe — then race to prove himself humanity’s savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything. The cast includes Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons, and the film was shot entirely in VistaVision, the large-format system that has become Iñárritu’s calling card for theatrical spectacle.

Hathaway’s review arrives with an obvious subtext: she and Cruise are about to be colleagues. Cruise and Hathaway announced in August that they will co-star in a sequel to his 1990 NASCAR movie Days of Thunder, People reported — and Just Jared noted that Hathaway will next begin work on it after taking time off following the birth of her third child. Cruise, for his part, has been publicly generous to her: in July he heaped praise on her summer hit The Odyssey, posting a thank-you to director Christopher Nolan, producer Emma Thomas and the cast and crew after a screening at AMC Lincoln Square, where he even gathered the theater’s employees to join him. Hathaway has yet to publicly comment on Verity’ box-office triumph over Digger — her five-star review might be the comment.

The Letterboxd debut is also revealing about Hathaway’s own viewing habits. People reported that she opened her official Letterboxd account in April, at which point she logged movies like Sinners, Bugonia, Eden and One Battle After Another in her diary. Between July and October, she only logged movies she appeared in herself — The Odyssey, The End of Oak Street and Verity. Digger is the first film she has publicly rated with Letterboxd’s five-star system, and the first she has shared an opinion on with a written comment. For the curious: her four listed favorite films are the 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck, Clark Gable’s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, Tarkovsky’s 1975 Mirror and Daniel Day-Lewis’ 2017 Phantom Thread — a list that suggests the woman who calls Digger “trippy and ambitious” has the film-school receipts to back it up.

Whether the celebrity pile-on can save Digger’s theatrical run is another question. With a reported budget of at least $125 million, an $8 million opening leaves almost no path to profitability, and the film would need a historic word-of-mouth turnaround to avoid a nine-figure write-down. What the Hathaway endorsement does buy is cultural staying power: the difference between a flop everyone forgets and a flop that becomes a cause célèbre. Hollywood has a long, fond history of the latter — the commercial disaster that finds its audience late and never really dies. With del Toro, Howard, Powell and now Hathaway all on the record, Digger is assembling the most distinguished rescue committee a bomb has ever had. The box office may be a lost cause. The reputation, apparently, is still in play.

For more on this fall’s box-office picture, see our weekend box-office breakdown and how Spider-Man: Brand New Day is dominating the charts.