Tom Cruise’s Digger was never going to be an easy sell. Partly because it’s a metatextual, finger-wagging climate farce that disguises its leading man beneath prosthetic make-up and a fake beer belly. Partly, too, because it’s absolutely atrocious. Full of didactic monologues, jokes that don’t land, incredibly skilled supporting actors doing career-worst work, and a tone that veers between smug posturing and performative indifference (early in development it was quite literally titled Blah Blah Blah), Alejandro G Iñárritu’s new film is practically repellent by design. Still, Warner Bros seemed to curse their own movie by selling it to audiences via the most puzzlingly aloof promotional campaign in recent memory. “Dead on arrival” seems too kind a description for what went down here.

Digger is – at first, anyway – the story of Digger Rockwell, a neanderthal Texan oil magnate who has ignored warnings about the security of his Antarctic pipelines and is now weathering the consequences. Namely that an ice shelf has detached and will imminently collide with Europe. Cruise plays Digger like a Taylor Sheridan character with a head injury, a man who loves a penis size analogy and whose best friend is a decrepit, animatronic cat. An unusually awful John Goodman is the American president, stricken with what he repeatedly terms “ass cancer”, and an unusually awful Sandra Hüller is Digger’s nihilistic deadpan sister.

Only, none of this is actually real. What we’re watching is the tech rehearsal of a play, inspired by real events, starring Cruise’s Curtis Markson, an actor who seems to realise he’s the leading man in a dire spectacle unsure of its own reason for existing. See, Fossil Fools – as we learn the play is called – is supposed to be unfunny and pointless, Iñárritu using his story-within-a-story approach to address if not actually grapple with the futility of satirical art at a time of total global breakdown. Or something. And we oscillate between these two sagas – the risible play and its confused cast and crew – for an interminable two hours. Are you laughing yet?

Digger has inevitably collapsed at the global box office. In its opening weekend, it’s made $20m worldwide, $8m of which was grossed in the US. This would be a disaster even if Digger didn’t have a price tag of somewhere between $150m and $180m, with marketing costs on top of that. It’s not just the biggest flop of the year, but the biggest flop of Cruise’s career – something not exactly buffered by reviews, which have overall been mixed to negative.

Professional obituaries are likely being prepped in the industry as we speak. The Warner Bros executives who greenlit the film were let go amid the Warner-Paramount studio merger over the weekend (not officially because of Digger per se, but its reception has capped a string of eye-wateringly expensive WB flops this year, among them The Bride! and Supergirl); Iñárritu, an Oscar winner for Birdman and The Revenant, will likely never get this sort of budget again; Cruise seemed to anticipate widespread audience rejection of his against-type work in Digger by announcing a Days of Thunder sequel less than six weeks ago (it’ll be his next movie, and arrive in the summer of 2028).

Still, the second biggest question I had after seeing Digger – the first being, succinctly, “why????” – was whether there was any way to sell it better. Each promotional “drop” for the film since its first teaser trailer was unveiled in December has been angled a little differently, as if Warner Bros had no decisive strategy for getting Digger seen. The studio has likewise seemed hamstrung by the film’s (perhaps necessary) secrecy, to an extent that even Cruise’s high-profile GQ interview last month didn’t bother explaining what Digger was about, beyond the broadest strokes of its plot.

Instead, Digger was largely sold on the allure of Cruise’s physical transformation. Its early posters and teaser trailers kept his face hidden, borrowing a trick from 2024’s horror hit Longlegs, which kept Nicolas Cage’s eerily sunken, prosthetics-aided appearance as the titular serial killer out of its promotion. A further trailer went one further by suggesting Digger is the culmination of Cruise’s decades in showbiz, introducing 30 seconds of Digger footage with a two-minute supercut of past Cruise performances, from Top Gun and Jerry Maguire to, um, Austin Powers 3. “[Digger] is the culmination of all my skills,” Cruise told GQ, staying on (early) message. “I’ve never done it before … It’s the most challenging character ever.”

This angle – which wasn’t the worst idea in the world – ultimately flew out the window, however. Subsequent trailers revealed Cruise’s puffy new face and introduced a plot, but so abstractly that – anecdotally, at least – questions still abounded about what Digger was about. Trailers suggested a vague yet madcap end-of-the-world comedy filled with lots of actorly mugging, and little else. And while media outlets were instructed to avoid questions about the theatre-play rug-pull during interviews with the cast, as well as mention of it in social media reactions and reviews, there was no attempt to sell the film on the very existence of a mad plot twist – this wasn’t the April hit The Drama, which deliberately withheld its Zendaya-was-nearly-a-school-shooter premise from its trailers, but fully leant into the fact that something shocking was being kept secret, to be revealed once you’d bought a ticket.

Instead of playing up the mystery of its premise, Digger has ultimately resorted to a kind of promotional debasement, in recent days fully embracing its poor reviews with a series of trailers hinging on its divisive reception. One ad juxtaposed adjectives from reviews: “unpleasant” and “masterpiece”, “insufferable” and “magnificent”. It calls to mind the last chance saloon of Paul Verhoeven’s unhinged nudie psycho-drama Showgirls in 1995, promotion of which quickly pivoted once it was met by dire reviews: its backers at MGM stopped selling Showgirls as a sensual thriller for straights, and instead billed it as a camp would-be classic for girls and gays. Within months, the studio began paying for official Showgirls drag queens to attend the midnight screenings that had cropped up upon release, where audiences were already quoting lines back to the screen and throwing French fries over themselves in tribute to one particularly baffling bit of acting by star Elizabeth Berkley early in the film.

The thing is, Showgirls was misunderstood at the time, buried under a blitz of bad-faith criticism and misogyny; it was rescued and made immortal by people smart enough to get on its wavelength. You can imagine Warner Bros – and Cruise – hope Digger will experience its own reappraisal, and fast. But it’s unclear who will step in to rescue Digger. Professional contrarians? The deeply annoying? It’s too pallid-looking to be aesthetically embraced, too tonally confused to be reimagined as a secret classic. It just sits there, grim and unloveable, a stab to the gut for original, expensive storytelling less than 12 months after Sinners and One Battle After Another proved just how much potential this sort of large-scale filmmaking still has.

Instead Digger’s prospects seemed to begin and end in those months of vague pre-release teasing. In another world, Digger could have been sold as a wildly experimental backstage comedy, a movie you had to see to fully experience its twistiness. Or simply a chance to witness its unrecognisable A-list star doing something he’d never done before (OK, other than in Tropic Thunder, but we’ll ignore that). Maybe then it would have made a bit of money. But that would have required the kind of imagination a film like Digger only pretends to have.

‘Digger’ is in cinemas

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