Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ Is Headed for a $250 Million Loss, Per The Wrap — One of the Biggest Bombs in Recent History

It was supposed to be the movie that turned Tom Cruise into an awards-season auteur. Instead, Digger is on track to become one of the most expensive failures in modern box-office history.

LOS ANGELES — An exclusive report from The Wrap says the quirky, end-of-the-world satire starring Cruise is poised to lose a stunning $250 million by the end of its run, even when factoring in post-theatrical revenue. The outlet said the film is “by far the biggest loss for the movie star, and one of the largest losses in recent years of movie releases.” Earlier estimates had pegged the damage at around $125 million — already brutal — but the new projection is roughly double that figure after the film earned just $8 million domestically and $21 million globally in its opening weekend. A second individual familiar with the film’s budget and performance put the likely loss slightly lower, between $200 million and $215 million depending on PVOD performance, adding, per The Wrap: “it’s a shocking failure.”

The timing could hardly be worse for the studio’s new owners. According to The Wrap, Skydance executives were shocked to learn the extent of the loss when the Warner Bros. company was handed over this week, in the wake of the Warner Bros.–Paramount mega-merger. As ComingSoon noted in its coverage of the report, the film is not expected to exceed $40 million in worldwide box office, according to insiders at Skydance. A Warner Bros. representative had no comment. The optics of the new regime’s first full week being defined by a historic bomb on an auteur passion project — directed by Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu and heavily pushed as a strong Academy Awards contender — is about as bad as first weeks get.

The anatomy of the disaster is a case study in how budgets can escape a production. The Wrap’s reporting puts the production budget at $173 million, according to multiple insiders — a figure inflated by a problem with Cruise’s prosthetics, which was covered by insurance, plus a $25 million overage tied to Cruise being delayed in finishing Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Another insider put the final budget at $163 million. The marketing budget was about $100 million, mostly related to Cruise’s global press tour. And unlike big-budget franchise titles that spread the risk across financing partners, Digger was fully financed by Warner Bros. — which means, as The Wrap notes, the loss is Warner’s to shoulder in full.

Critics didn’t save it, and audiences barely showed up. The film premiered September 22, 2026, in London as part of the Royal Film Performance in Leicester Square, and debuted to a 41% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, per ComingSoon. It stood at a 53% rating on September 29, just days before its release, and now sits at 52% critics and 73% audiences — a divide that suggests the people who did find the film were far kinder to it than the critical consensus. Released October 2, it landed at No. 5 at the domestic box office behind the Verity juggernaut — the Anne Hathaway thriller opened to $62 million worldwide, as we reported. The Numbers has the film’s worldwide gross at just over $23 million.

On screen, the film was a genuine departure. Cruise plays a rich oil magnate — the title character, Digger — whose wells trigger a global environmental catastrophe, appearing as a paunchy, balding billionaire living with a dying cat among mounted stuffed animals, per The Wrap’s description. It was one of several big swings on auteur filmmakers from Warner Bros. Pictures leadership, and it arrived with exactly the kind of marketing blitz reserved for event cinema. SlashFilm, covering the fallout, noted that the failure lands at a brutal moment: the merged company needs hits to justify the acquisition, and a movie starring the biggest star in the world from an Oscar-winning director just tanked in historic fashion as the merger closed.

The comparisons will be uncomfortable. A $250 million loss places Digger alongside the worst wide-release bets of the modern era — and far beyond Cruise’s usual record, which has been remarkably loss-proof across four decades. Cruise’s path forward, per MovieWeb, runs through legacy sequels: Days of Thunder 2, pairing him with Anne Hathaway, is expected to begin filming in early 2027 ahead of a 2028 release, alongside continued work on a third Top Gun. The industry lesson of Digger will likely echo for years — as SlashFilm wrote that the lesson shouldn’t be “don’t make original movies,” but “make them with a more responsible price tag.”

For the new Skydance regime, the question is what survives of the old Warner Bros. auteur strategy. The studio heads who greenlit a $173 million experimental dark comedy from an arthouse legend are no longer the ones signing the checks — and the first message the company has sent itself is written in nine figures of red ink. Digger is still playing in theaters. Almost nobody is watching.

For more on this weekend’s box office, see our weekend box office report and our Verity debut story.