Digger may lose $150m after Tom Cruise film bombs at the box office

Digger has flopped in its opening weekend with a $20m global box office, handing Tom Cruise one of the worst debuts of his career and serving as a bitter final note for Warner Bros as a standalone studio.

Alejandro G Iñárritu’s critically panned satire grossed a paltry $8m at the North American box office. Cruise is typically a big draw overseas, but international sales – $12m from 74 markets – were also weak.

It is a rough start for a movie that cost at least $125m to make. Reports have pegged the production budget closer to $150m, while the marketing spend is estimated at another $100m. After reviews so bad that Warner Bros opted to run “decide for yourself” ads, estimates for Digger had been revised down over the past week.

No 1 in North American theaters instead went to Amazon MGM’s Verity, which debued with $32.6m, extending the streak for Colleen Hoover adaptations at the box office. The Michael Showalter-directed film stars Dakota Johnson as a writer hired to ghostwrite a book series by an incapacitated author, played by Anne Hathaway.

Digger had been positioned as a potential awards-season heavyweight, dated almost exactly the same as Warner Bros’ One Battle After Another was last year. The Tom Cruise film is a similarly politically charged release that handed a large budget to a top film-maker working from an original story – but One Battle After Another grossed $213.2m worldwide and, more importantly, won best picture at the Academy Awards.

The disappointing opening comes as Paramount Skydance completes its acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery after approval from the US district court for the $110bn deal was received last Wednesday. Paramount said it would close the merger on Tuesday and mass layoffs are anticipated to follow.

In a flush year for Hollywood, Warner Bros has failed to get one film to $100m in the US, though its December release, Dune: Part III, will easily cross that.

“Digger collapsed this weekend and the new management of the combined Paramount and Warner Bros, David Ellison and Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, will soon decide what kind of movies they want from WB,” wrote David A Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office figures. “Paramount does not have a recent history of making big, auteur-driven films like this – that strategy appears to be over and out.”

Critics have mostly slammed Digger as a strained climate change farce, though Cruise’s over-the-top performance was received more warmly. Audiences agreed, giving it a “C+” CinemaScore.

Cruise has spent most of the last decade starring in Mission: Impossible movies and Top Gun: Maverick, franchises that have allowed him to remain a top action hero into his 60s. The 64-year-old’s last major box-office disappointment was 2017’s The Mummy remake, which grossed $409.2m worldwide on a $195m budget.

Last weekend’s top film, Avengers Endgame: Encore, slid to seventh place with $4.4m domestically and $14.4m overseas. But the Marvel rerelease’s second week allowed Endgame to nudge ahead of Avatar to reclaim the title of highest grossing film ever, not accounting for inflation. The two films have traded spots in recent years with rereleases: Endgame now tallies $2.9255bn, while Avatar is at $2.9237bn.