A man. A plan. A meltdown — at the box office.
Digger, Tom Cruise's climate-change satire with Alejandro G. Iñárritu, is projected to lose Warner Bros. a staggering $250 million, per an exclusive TheWrap report — nearly double the earlier $125 million estimate, and enough to put it on the all-time bomb list alongside John Carter and The Marvels.
The math is brutal. The final production budget landed around $173 million (some insiders say $163M), with another $100 million spent on marketing — much of it Cruise's global press tour. Against that: an October 2 opening of $8 million domestic and $21 million worldwide, and Skydance insiders don't expect the film to crack $40 million by the end of its run. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a paunchy, balding oil tycoon whose reckless drilling triggers a global environmental catastrophe — his most political role in decades — and critics are split down the middle (52% on Rotten Tomatoes, audiences kinder at 73%).
The DAOS take: there's poetry in a movie about an oil billionaire drilling himself into oblivion getting buried at the box office. Hollywood's old guard is rallying anyway — Guillermo del Toro told the numbers where to go ("love the arts, fuck the charts"), with Anne Hathaway, Jane Fonda, and Glen Powell cosigning. Sometimes the fight around the art is more interesting than the art itself.
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Sources: ComingSoon (via TheWrap) · Consequence · mxdwn Movies
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