Tom Cruise's Digger Takes Just $20 Million Worldwide, Leaving Warner Bros Facing a Possible $150 Million Loss

LOS ANGELES — Tom Cruise's Digger opened to about $20 million worldwide, one of the weakest debuts of his career and a poor last note for Warner Bros. as a standalone studio.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu's satire grossed $8 million in North America and $12 million from 74 international markets, the Associated Press reported. Cruise is usually stronger overseas. He was not this weekend.

The film cost at least $125 million to make. Reports put the production budget closer to $150 million, with marketing estimated at another $100 million. On those figures the opening does not cover a meaningful share of the outlay. After reviews bad enough that Warner Bros. ran "decide for yourself" ads, weekend estimates had already been cut.

Digger finished behind Amazon MGM's Verity, which opened at No. 1 in North America with $32.6 million. Michael Showalter's film stars Dakota Johnson as a writer hired to ghostwrite a series for an incapacitated author played by Anne Hathaway. It extends a box-office run for adaptations of Colleen Hoover's books.

Warner Bros. had dated Digger almost exactly as it dated One Battle After Another last year, and had treated it as an awards-season prospect: a large budget, an original story, a major director, a political charge. One Battle After Another grossed $213.2 million worldwide and won the Academy Award for best picture. Digger has a C+ CinemaScore. Critics have mostly called it a strained climate farce. Cruise's performance drew the warmer notices. Riz Ahmed plays Dr. Nirav Ganesh opposite Cruise's Digger Rockwell.

The opening lands as Paramount Skydance finishes buying Warner Bros. Discovery. A U.S. district court approved the $110 billion deal last Wednesday. Paramount said it would close the merger on Tuesday. Mass layoffs are expected after 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," David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a box-office newsletter, wrote. "Paramount does not have a recent history of making big, auteur-driven films like this — that strategy appears to be over and out."

Warner Bros. has not had a film reach $100 million in the United States this year. Dune: Part III, set for December, is expected to clear that mark. Digger will not.

Cruise, 64, has spent most of the last decade in Mission: Impossible films and Top Gun: Maverick, the franchises that kept him a leading action draw into his 60s. His last major disappointment on this scale was The Mummy in 2017, which grossed $409.2 million worldwide on a $195 million budget — a weak return, and still many times Digger's opening. A $20 million global start does not have an obvious path to that kind of total.

The rest of the weekend chart was a rerelease. Avengers: Endgame, playing as an encore, fell to seventh with $4.4 million domestically and $14.4 million overseas. The second week of that run put Endgame back ahead of Avatar as the highest-grossing film on record, not adjusted for inflation. Endgame now stands at $2.9255 billion. Avatar is at $2.9237 billion. The two have traded places for years on rereleases.

Digger's problem is not the chart around it. A new Cruise film opened to less than a Marvel encore added in its second week, and to less than a Hoover adaptation. International markets, the usual cushion, added $12 million. Against a production cost reported near $150 million and a marketing bill near $100 million, the loss case is the one in the headline. Gross's note is the industry reading: the film failed, and the studio that bet on this kind of original, director-driven picture is about to change hands.