Tom Cruise climate film set to be one of biggest ever box office flops
Tom Cruise climate film set to be one of biggest ever box office flops
Lily ShanagherMon, October 12, 2026 at 5:47 PM UTC
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Tom Cruise plays an over-the-top oil tycoon named Digger in the film - Film Stills
Tom Cruise’s climate crisis film Digger is on track to become one of the biggest Hollywood box office flops of all time.
The satirical film about an oil tycoon whose drilling triggers climate pandemonium is to lose $245m (£185m) in cinemas.
Despite an expensive press tour and Oscar hopes, the film’s message and a score of critical reviews appear to have failed to capture audiences, with an opening weekend of just $8m (£6m).
This leaves Warner Bros doomed to lose as much as $200m (£151m) – a failure putting Digger up with films such as John Carter, a 2012 sci-fi film starring Taylor Kitsch and Willem Dafoe that lost Disney between $255m and $280m.
Cruise plays an over-the-top oil tycoon named Digger – described by Variety as Lyndon B Johnson crossed with Foghorn Leghorn, the moneyed rooster in the Looney Tunes cartoons – whose incessant drilling causes an ice shelf to snap off Greenland and crash into northern Europe. Ecological disaster ensues.
Tom Cruise as Digger - Film Stills
Critics have said the film’s lecturing patronises audiences, with Variety’s Owen Gleiberman calling it a “bombastically self-important satire” – not the description Alejandro G Inarritu, the director, best known for The Revenant and Birdman, would have been hoping for.
“Did I mention that the movie is about climate change?” writes Mr Gleiberman, who accuses the movie of guilt-tripping the audience.
“In its very extremity, the film is saying that the situation we face is so dire, so on the precipice of disaster, that if you watch this movie and somehow fail to embrace its ‘visionary’ message of apocalypse now, you’re contributing to the problem.
“It punches up the fact that we’re never going to solve the climate-change crisis until we disentangle it from the hot air of people celebrating themselves.”
Bilge Ebiri of Vulture was no kinder to Digger, Warner Bros’ last film before the completion of its acquisition by Paramount.
“Digger is a torturous experience, sometimes purposely so, often unintentionally so,” the reviewer wrote.
“For all the film’s crazy performances, its directorial grandstanding, its wildly miscalculated rug pulling, a genuine current of civilisational despair runs through Digger.”
The film’s climate hand-wringing was also accused of being hypocritical, with The Guardian pointing out: “Tactfully, Digger does not attack movie stars’ private planes.”
Sales plummeted even further in the second weekend, with 60 per cent fewer tickets sold.
At $35.3m so far, the film is likely to end its box office run with around $50m worldwide. It would need around $300m to break even.
The marketing campaign has attempted to adapt to the poor reception.
A new trailer features some of the most and least flattering words used to describe the satire, flitting between “masterpiece” and “unpleasant”, “magnificent” and “insufferable” as well as “brilliant and baffling” as viewers are encouraged to “decide for yourself”.
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Tom Cruise at a Digger press conference in Seoul, South Korea on Oct 1 - 2026 Getty Images/Chung Sung-Jun
It also attempted to contrast negative American reviews with positive reviews from outside the US, Cruise’s character declaring at the end: “You decide which!”
Despite suffering his worst opening weekend since Lions for Lambs in 2007, Cruise, 64, said he was proud of the film, which has a 51 per cent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The actor also said he did not consider the opening weekend when he made films. “You’re going, how can I make a film that hopefully will translate and last and evolve... I never thought of movies, when I’m making them, going ‘opening weekend’,” he told the On Film With Kevin McCarthy podcast.
But Alexander Larman at The Spectator was scathing about the role. “He has failed to convert the world to Scientology,” he wrote, “and so his pictures now deal with issues that set him up as an old-school preacher.”
The film was described by Vulture as a ‘torturous experience’ - Film Stills
Critics don’t expect history to absolve Digger, either, unlike other flops that became cult classics such as Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 psycho-drama Showgirls .
“Showgirls was rescued and made immortal by people smart enough to get on its wavelength,” writes Adam White of The Independent.
“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.”
Not all reception was negative.
The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin gave the film four stars, summing it up as the year’s “weirdest, wildest studio movie”.
Celebrities also came to Digger’s defence, such as Anne Hathaway, who took to Letterboxd to call the film “brilliant”.
“I loved this brilliant movie,” the actress wrote. “It’s smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious. It’s worth making the time to see and decide for yourself what you make of it.”
Jane Fonda said: “The film finds an original and, yes, risky way to wake us up about the climate crisis.”
With an additional Oscar campaign of around $15m speculated to be scaled back, the film’s thud means Cruise may have to wait longer for that long-coveted accolade.
The Social Reckoning also suffered at the box office, flopping with a $5.5m box office debut, hampered by a lack of interest and poor reviews.
Aaron Sorkin’s film about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg starring Jeremy Strong, Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White was made to accompany David Fincher’s 2010 box office success The Social Network, which opened to $22m.
Production company Sony had tried to distance the two films, worried about the latter living in the shadows of Fincher’s film.
Jesse Eisenberg, who starred as Zuckerberg in 2010, passed on the Social Reckoning role because he was worried about glamourising the Meta tech mogul.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
