Tom Cruise Is the Last Movie Star. 'Digger' Is About to Prove What That Costs.

Tom Cruise's new movie opens today, and I want to talk about what it is actually testing, because it is not testing whether the movie is good. Digger — Alejandro G. Iñárritu's 'comedy of catastrophic proportions,' starring Cruise as an oil tycoon trying to save humanity from a disaster he caused — is tracking toward an $8 to $15 million domestic opening weekend, depending on whose numbers you trust. Boxoffice Pro's Daniel Loria has it as low as $8 to $12 million, possibly opening in a 'modest' fifth place. Variety's tracking sits at $12 to $15 million, down from $18 to $20 million earlier. The budget is reported at $160 to $180 million, up from $125 million; the break-even is somewhere between the studio's $300 million and the trades' $350 million. None of this is a review. All of it is a referendum.

The referendum question: does movie stardom exist anymore outside of franchises? This is Cruise's first non-franchise film in nine years — three Mission: Impossibles and Top Gun: Maverick since he last played a character whose name was not already a brand. Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock told Variety that Cruise has 'earned' the right to star in a risky film like Digger, while noting, with the gentleness of a man delivering a eulogy, that Cruise is a 'franchise machine' at the end of the day. That is the whole story in one quote: the industry's last movie star earned the right to prove he is one, and the proof may be that he isn't — not anymore, not outside the harness.

The warning signs have been lit for weeks. At a Producers Guild of America sneak peek Q&A, Cruise and Iñárritu sat before an industry crowd and, per Page Six's veteran producer source, 'you could feel the air drop out of the room' at how audaciously the film played. The Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 53%, which Page Six suggests may be bolstered by influencer-boosted reviews. The marketing leaned on influencers to generate buzz — always a tell, the way a laugh track is a tell. Pundits have quietly removed the film from their Oscars lists. Cruise himself has done more press than usual, promoting the Iñárritu partnership at every stop, which is what a star does when the movie cannot promote itself.

Here is the part nobody wants to say out loud: if Digger opens to $10 million, it will not mean Tom Cruise is finished. It will mean the thing we called 'Tom Cruise, movie star' was always, in the back half of his career, 'Tom Cruise, franchise delivery system' — Ethan Hunt and Maverick, characters the audience had already agreed to love, with Cruise as the premium packaging. That is not an insult. It is the business model that saved theatrical exhibition. But it means the 'last movie star' title was doing quiet work it could not defend: borrowing the audience's love of the franchise and spending it as personal charisma. The test was always going to come. It just happened to come with a $170 million Iñárritu satire about an oil baron.

I want the movie to be good. A great Digger would be the best possible outcome for everyone — for Cruise, for Warner Bros., for the idea that a star and an auteur can still open a movie on nerve alone. But the tracking is the tracking, and the tracking says the audience has already decided what it is buying this weekend, and it is not a dare. Whatever happens by Sunday night, we will have learned something real about what stardom is now. That is worth more than the opening weekend. Not $170 million more. But more. Grade: Incomplete — for the experiment. The receipts arrive Sunday.