'Decide for Yourself': The Tell-All Marketing of Tom Cruise's 'Digger'

The numbers first, because the numbers are doing the talking now. Warner Bros.' Digger — Alejandro González Iñárritu's $125-million (or, depending on whom you ask at the studio, somewhat less; or, depending on whom you ask everywhere else, closer to $160–180 million) 'comedy of catastrophic proportions' — opens Friday, October 2, tracking toward a $12–15 million domestic opening weekend, down from earlier projections of $18–20 million. The studio, which has disputed the budget figure, puts the break-even point closer to $300 million. You do the subtraction; I'll wait.

The film itself: Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a wealthy oil tycoon whose business helps cause an ecological catastrophe and who then embarks on a frantic mission to convince the world he alone can fix it — 'humanity's saviour,' in the official synopsis's phrasing, before the disaster he's unleashed destroys everything. The cast around him is genuinely formidable: Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde, Emma D'Arcy. This is Cruise's first film with Warner Bros. since the studio signed him to develop and produce theatrical movies, and his first real departure in years from the action vehicles — the Mission: Impossible films, Top Gun: Maverick — that rebuilt him into the last true movie star, the kind of actor whose name above the title used to be a business plan.

And then the reviews arrived, divided in the way that makes publicists reach for the antacid: roughly 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with Variety's roundup finding some critics praising Cruise's performance and Iñárritu's ambition — long sentences for the ambition, always, because Birdman and The Revenant earned them — while others called the film 'unpleasant' and 'baffling.' Which brings us to the studio's response, and the actual subject of this column: Warner Bros. has begun running ads encouraging audiences to 'decide for yourself.'

Now. There is nothing new about a studio sidestepping bad reviews; there is, however, something instructive about the phrasing. 'Decide for yourself' is what you say when the conversation is going badly and you would like a different one. It is a surrender dressed as empowerment, an admission that the film's unusual premise and deliberately strange tone — Variety's words — could not be sold as a straightforward blockbuster and so must be sold as a dare. Iñárritu has never made a straightforward anything, and that is precisely his value; but neither of his Oscar winners cost $180 million, and neither opened in the middle of the worst year Warner Bros. has had in recent memory.

The honest version of this ad would read: 'Critics are divided, the tracking is soft, and we spent a fortune — come see the thing anyway.' I would respect that ad. I might even buy a ticket. What 'decide for yourself' really decides is that the studio has run out of arguments, which is a shame, because 'Tom Cruise plays an oil baron trying to save the world from himself' is an argument. It's a weird one. But weird was available, and weird is what Iñárritu does best. Instead of selling the weird, they sold the shrug.

Grade: C — for the campaign. The film, mercifully, is not the campaign. Probably.

The weekend numbers, for the record, were worse than the dare. Digger took in $3.4 million on Friday (including $1.2 million from Thursday previews) across 3,321 theaters, heading toward an estimated $8 million weekend — some rival trackers had it as low as $7–7.5 million, well under even the studio's $12–15 million projection. For Tom Cruise, a movie star whose name above the title has been a near-guarantee for four decades, that would be his worst star-vehicle wide opening since Legend in 1985 — worse, adjusted, than the $6.7 million Lions for Lambs managed in 2007 on a fraction of the budget. Audiences gave it a C+ CinemaScore, one of the worst grades of his career, and Rotten Tomatoes settled at 51 percent with critics (6.1/10 average) and a 45 on Metacritic; audiences were only slightly kinder, with 47 percent of PostTrak respondents saying they'd definitely recommend it. Across the aisle, Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson's erotic thriller Verity — also carrying a C+ CinemaScore and worse reviews (34 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) — cruised to a $33 million-plus weekend. The lesson of the weekend, if Hollywood is capable of learning it, is the oldest one in the business: nobody in the dark is buying a $160 million auteur satire about an oil baron when the poster is a shrug.

And about that shrug: "decide for yourself" is not without precedent. As Wikipedia's own account of the film notes, the tactic was immediately compared to Francis Ford Coppola's 2024 Megalopolis campaign, which rolled out its mixed-reception review quotes as a badge of honor — bad notices sold as proof of artistic daring. There's an old tradition here, of course: when reviews are bad, sell the controversy; when reviews are mixed, sell the argument. What makes the Digger version feel so hollow is that the argument was available all along — a balding, blimped-out Cruise playing humanity's savior as the villain of his own catastrophe is genuinely strange and genuinely interesting — and the studio sold the posture instead. Meanwhile the timing could hardly be worse: the film is landing on the eve of the Skydance-Paramount takeover of Warner Bros., with studio chiefs Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy out on their contracts, a changing of the guard that makes a nine-figure bomb feel less like an aberration and more like a closing statement. For more on the weekend's other big swing, see our Avengers: Doomsday rundown — and if your appetite for chaotic launches runs to the musical, Kevin Hart, Kai Cenat, and Druski just shadow-dropped a movie of their own.