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On Monday, Tom Cruise signed autographs and posed for photos outside The Directors Village for the Los Angeles premiere of “Digger,” flashing the confident smile that made him a screen legend.
However, long before Cruise hit the red carpet with Warner Bros. movie bosses. Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, who praised him for green-lighting “Digger” without needing to turn a page of his script, it was clear that the film was going to move. It was too dark, too strange, too dark. Opening weekend previews continued to downplay whatever Cruise did to nail the satire – dancing through Jennifer Hudson’s “spirit tunnel” explaining the finer points of VistaVision to the Kelce brothers, or talking about getting older. a completely normal way by GQ.
But few had expected how badly the film would bomb. Well, “Digger” is DOA, having opened to a disastrous $8 million this weekend. It was well below the weekend’s other new release, “Verity,” an adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel that critics lambasted en route to its $32.6 million opening, and which was also surpassed by such investments as “Resident Evil” and “Primetime.” International audiences, who usually show up for Cruise flicks, aren’t buying tickets. “Digger” earned $12 million from 74 markets to bring IRS’s global haul to $20 million. The only hope is that “Digger” can re-emerge as an awards contender, an unlikely outcome, but one that would provide some cultural value.
As it stands “Digger”, which officially cost $125 million to produce (sources peg the actual price tag at $160 million to $180 million), needs to make around $350 million theatrically to break even. Warner Bros., which backed the film with Legendary, has broken even at $300 million. That means “Digger” is looking at a loss of $150 million or more, according to two officials familiar with its finances. For context, theaters keep half of ticket sales and Warner Bros. spent tens of millions to market “Digger.” A spokesperson for Warner Bros. declined to comment. to give an opinion.
Not much to spin. “Digger” will go down as one of the greatest, if not the greatest most flops of Cruise’s career. It has had a few – “The Mummy,” for example, lost $95 million and killed Universal’s Dark Universe intentions in their cradle. The most recent Cruise film to open softer than “Digger,” the 2007 political thriller “Lions for Lambs,” was another disappointment, even though it only cost $35 million to make. “Digger” is already a historical bomb, keeping company with the likes of “John Carter,” “Cutthroat Island,” and “The Lone Ranger.”
As for De Luca and Abdy, they are still on the Warners lot, but not for long. The studio’s new owner, David Ellison, let them know on Friday that they would not continue in their roles when Skydance took control and merged the company with Paramount. And the big loss of the film will justify a pivot that felt inevitable as soon as it was announced that Ellison was making a screenplay for Warner Bros. – less “Diggers,” more “Days of Thunder 2’s”.
Unfortunately, the mogul may be right from a financial perspective. De Luca and Abdy were the friendliest studio heads, giving Paul Thomas Anderson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ryan Coogler, and Alejandro González Iñárritu the kinds of budgets they would have struggled to get elsewhere.
Sometimes their bets paid off. Few would question the wisdom of the “Sinners” deal they made with Coogler returning the film’s copyright to him, even though they did it first. After all, “Sinners” was a hit. More recently, De Luca and Abdy’s ambitious gambits have failed to yield profits. “The Bride!” Gyllenhaal and Iñárritu’s “Digger” are among the biggest losers of the decade, while Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was an Oscar-winning write-up. When “One Battle After Another” swept the Academy Awards, a senior executive reminded me of their separate order. “We’re not going to lose $100 million to win Best Picture,” the executive said.
That may be good news for Skydance shareholders, who are understandably concerned about how Ellison is going to operate two entertainment giants while paying down $80 billion in debt, but it won’t be good for movie theaters. Love it or hate it, “Digger” is bold swing. Iñárritu’s dark take on corporate greed and climate change is loaded with big ideas, and Cruise gives the kind of broken performance he’s largely abandoned for an action hero. It may be a while before moviegoers see him in this mode again.
As for Cruise, he may have praised the chutzpah of De Luca and Abdy, but he also knows Ellison very well, having done “Top Gun: Maverick” and several “Mission: Impossible” films with Skydance. He has already given his blessing to the merger, telling Pat McAfee that Warner Bros. and Paramount together will bring “abundance”.
“They’re going to deliver 30 movies. It’s a community to me. It’s not a business. The people in these studios aren’t just people in the studios, they’re my family,” Cruise told McAfee. “I know we are going to get those 30 films. I want us all to come together as a community to make those 30 films.
According to a report in TheWrap, when Abdy and De Luca got a call from Ellison telling them they were out of the family, they got a dry response.
“Good for you,” Abdy said to Ellison with some sarcasm. “I left you 39 movies.”
But is it a slate full of “sinners” than “Diggers”?
