Tom Cruise’s New $200M Movie Is Officially One of His Worst Box Office Debuts

It's an unfortunate weekend in the history of movies — "the last movie star," Tom Cruise, is struggling to pull audiences to theaters, and the historic Warner Bros. is no more. Cruise's name shall always be intertwined in the studio's history, as his ambitious new film, Digger, is the final release in the studio's history as an independent entity. It will soon be rebranded, along with Paramount, as the Skydance Corporation. Digger's release also marks the end of studio chiefs Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca's tenure at the company, according to a recent Puck report. Amid all the action, the movie itself is poised to become a historic box-office bomb, with actual opening numbers falling short of even the most pessimistic projections.

Directed by the two-time Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñarritu, Digger was marketed as Cruise's long-awaited return to non-IP filmmaking — a movie that could win him an elusive acting Oscar. Early marketing material highlighted Cruise's career, while more recent assets have made a desperate bid to play up the satirical epic's divisive response. None of it has worked. The movie is currently sitting at a 52% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, "A stylized satire whose audacious design proves too mannered for some of the laughs to smoothly land, Digger is a bold swing of the shovel by Tom Cruise and Alejandro González Iñárritu that misses as often as it strikes gold."