Is Tom Cruise In Hollywood’s Biggest Ever Flop?

The Rest Is Entertainment

Marina Hyde and Richard Osman dissect the massive box office failure of Tom Cruise and Alejandro Iñárritu's eco-satire Digger, questioning whether Hollywood's appetite for high-risk auteur projects is sustainable

Key takeaways

• Digger opened to just $8 million domestically against an estimated $160-180 million budget, risking the title of Hollywood's biggest box office bomb ever.
• Warner Bros. executives Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi were recently ousted partly due to a string of critically acclaimed but commercially unpredictable films like Digger and Sinners.

Main topics

• Tom Cruise and Alejandro Iñárritu's Digger box office failure
• Hollywood studio economics and risk-taking post-DeLuca/Abdi era

Notable quotes

It is an art film that cost $180 million without marketing. It's high risk. It's big swing. And obviously it has not in any way paid off.

Conclusion

The episode reveals a shifting entertainment landscape where massive cinematic gambles face harsher

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) The rest is entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy, whose generation business backs, builds and manages renewable energy projects. On screen, though, the practicalities of sourcing power are slightly more negotiable. Speaker 1 (0:14) Certainly in scripts. I mean, my favourite energy source story, Back to the Future. Of course, they're supposed to have plutonium. They don't have plutonium. So they were like... Speaker 2 (0:22) Back when they go back in time. When they go back, yeah. So they need to get 1 Speaker 1 (0:25) .21 gigawatts. Which they get from the lightning strike, which they know is going to happen at 10.04. Very, very clever. Monsters, Inc. Now, you know where the power source is at Monsters, Inc.? Speaker 2 (0:35) Everything in Monstropolis is powered by children's screams, which is why they need to sort of harvest them. Speaker 1 (0:41) Yeah. may not work in real life. On Speaker 2 (0:43) screen, keeping the lights on does seem to require an unnecessary amount of drama. Speaker 1 (0:47) Now, Octopus Energy Generation has rather less need for a screenwriter. It backs, builds and manages renewable energy projects with 5.7 gigawatts of capacity across its portfolio, enough to power all the homes and businesses of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester combined. A slightly more conventional approach to generating power. Speaker 2 (1:13) Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest Is Entertainment with me Marina High. And Speaker 1 (1:17) me Richard Osman. Hello everyone. Hi Marina. Hi Speaker 2 (1:20) Richard. How are you? Speaker 1 (1:21) I'm all right. Yeah, just got back from filming Golden Elevators in Belgium. Got back yesterday, which means I've been able to catch up on Traitors as well. So I was finally able to listen to your amazing reaction podcast with Charlotte, one of my favourite ever Traitors contestants. If you haven't listened to it, it's fantastic. Watch the episodes first. But yeah, got back from... Golden Elevators. I think that's one of the things we're going to talk about this week, by the way, just about those big shows, how they're put together, why they're filmed in Belgium, etc, etc. So that's going to be one of our items today. But what else are we talking about? Speaker 2 (1:53) The Taylor Swift backlash. She released four new songs and various other things. But I think we're going to start with Speaker 1 (2:01) Digger. Speaker 2 (2:04) Anatomy of a flop. Is Speaker 1 (2:06) it the biggest box office failure of all time? And why? Speaker 2 (2:10) And why? Yes. Now, this is the Alejandro Iñárritu film that opened this weekend, starring Tom Cruise. I think it cost about $180 million. They're saying maybe $160 million, but I do not believe it. Without marketing. Speaker 1 (2:26) Without marketing. I know. Also, I love it when you've had a flop. It didn't cost $180 million. It was like, I mean, tops $160 million. Yeah. It was actually pretty cheap. Speaker 2 (2:36) It was, anyway, it has opened to 8 million North American box office, which regular viewers and listeners to this podcast will know officially categorizes it as a bomb. It is a bomb. It's not great. This has bombed real Speaker 1 (2:49) hard. I mean, it could be the biggest bomb of all time. I'll go into some numbers later. I sort of think it might be the biggest bomb of all time. Speaker 2 (2:57) And it's interesting. It's going to, well, yes, it's going to lose a ton of money. It's coming at a very difficult time in a way because... Those two film chiefs that we've talked about before at Warners who greenlit this, Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi, they are out as part of, remember they had that great 2025, well, they actually had two great quarters in 2025 with all sorts of things like weapons and sinners and one battle after another, the Minecraft movie, various things like that. And Speaker 1 (3:24) we thought, okay, we've understood how to reinvent Hollywood now. Speaker 2 (3:27) As part of David Ellison, remember this is the Kendall Roy who's now got Warner. who used to run something called Skydance about 15 minutes ago, now has both Paramount and Warner Brothers. And they are out, those two film chiefs. It's not totally because of this at all, but it's not great timing. I saw this film on Saturday morning. We are going to talk about what happened. And there are many mysteries that we don't Speaker 1 (3:53) know Speaker 2 (3:53) the answer to. But Speaker 1 (3:53) will you give us, only because I've been looking forward to it very much, will you give us an Insta Marina review of the film? Speaker 2 (4:01) It's so beautiful to look at, but it's like a university play that somebody spent $180 million without marketing on. What is it in terms of, okay, that is a question in itself. Obviously, it stars Tom Cruise. It is a sort of apocalyptic, satirical eco-farce, a black comedy. Above all, Richard, it is an art film. It is an art film that cost $180 million without marketing. It's high risk. It's big swing. And obviously it has not in any way paid off. It had bad buzz. Tom Cruise went as all in as you're going to see him in this day and age since 20 years ago. We just had to... definitive proof that he is insane. So he can be as much outward as possible. There were all sorts of kind of weird fan theories. I think people understood immediately that what they were seeing in the trailer, which sort of suggests that there's an oil man whose own actions cause a disaster and he must kind of get his shovel in the ground to fix it. It is not that. I don't want to go heavily detailed, but unfortunately... Speaker 1 (5:07) No, they're a huge... twists which we will not give away. What I will say is that Speaker 2 (5:13) I think that the story itself or the message itself is so sort of crass and on the nose that they constantly had to metarise it and in one very significant way they completely metarised it. Anyhow, so there was a sort of mystery to it. I think, you know, I suppose what people might compare it to is something like Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. Yeah, Speaker 1 (5:36) I've seen Speaker 2 (5:36) exactly that. Which Speaker 1 (5:36) he's paid for himself. Yeah, so the audience reaction, it's Speaker 2 (5:40) a Speaker 1 (5:40) bomb. The critical reaction as well. I'll just paraphrase a few people here. David Ehrlich called it a mega-budget Doctor Strangelove riff, so detached from reality that its most believable character is an animatronic one-eyed cat. In The Globe, they said they found it loud, ugly and blind to its own flaws. Stephanie Zakharak in Time said it spends its runtime setting the audience on its own genius. And there's another website which likened Cruise's look to Colonel Sanders. Fair to say it's not been a good weekend for Digger. Speaker 2 (6:09) So this is probably most comparable to another Warner's release, Joker Folliada, which Joker, the original Joker, you know, grossed a billion. I would say its audience, I'm not saying they're all incels, but it was very popular with young men. If you then want to make the sequel a musical starring Lady Gaga, okay, so interested in your models for that. Anyway, that did very badly. I don't think anyone thought in Hollywood that this film was going to be the saviour of the town or the saviour of a tourism or whatever it is. Speaker 1 (6:36) There wasn't. I mean, it could have been a year ago when, you know, in production when people had gone, you know what, those guys are doing something really special here, like something big. is happening in Pinewood with this movie. It's actually... Yeah, Speaker 2 (6:49) it's all shot here. Speaker 1 (6:49) I think they all worked out that this probably wasn't going to work. So no one was going, is it going to work? I want Speaker 2 (6:57) to Speaker 1 (6:57) talk about Speaker 2 (6:57) that Speaker 1 (6:57) a Speaker 2 (6:57) bit later Speaker 1 (6:58) when we get into it. But I Speaker 2 (6:59) have to say that Alejandro Iñárritu is not one of those big but butts in seats auteur people like... Greta Gerwig or Christopher Nolan or Ryan Coogler or any of those people. So Speaker 1 (7:14) probably Birdman and The Revenant are probably the two big things where he absolutely hit with audiences. So he can make a big 10-part movie. Speaker 2 (7:21) Birdman costs $17 million. And actually has thematically or structurally, there are elements that are very similar to this. But it's well over 10 times the cost. As you say, they shot it in Pinewood, entirely in VistaVision. To me, having seen it, it is an insanely non-commercial film. You are aware, even if the trailer is misleading, which it deliberately is, that you are watching some kind of eco-satire. Now, I'm so sorry, but neither eco nor satire is going to get you to where you need to be at the box office. And obviously it has something in common with Don't Look Up or Doctor Strange, but Don't Look Up goes straight onto Netflix. By the way... Inuiti's last film, Bardo, that was a flop really for Netflix. So I think there were warning signs here. To counterbalance all this, those two film chiefs, Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi, did have that run of success basically in Q2 and Q3 of 2025 with a lot of doesn't fit in a box films. Sinners does not fit in a box. Weapons does not particularly fit in a box office. They launch a new person in Zack Greger. One battle after another, which, by the way, does not make money at the box office, but does do quite pretty well. And it's a massive awards play. Exactly. Which this would be as well. And prestige Speaker 1 (8:45) is quite important. Prestige actually has a monetary value in Hollywood. When Speaker 2 (8:48) you've Speaker 1 (8:48) had Speaker 2 (8:48) some big grossing other things. When you're conjuring last right has got half a billion and it costs nothing, really. So you counterweight those things. And it would have made money. by the time it got to the second window or whatever. So it wasn't that big of a sort of disaster at all, theatrically at all, one after another. No, Speaker 1 (9:06) they were Speaker 2 (9:06) waiting. Speaker 1 (9:07) They were waiting for their big disaster. Speaker 2 (9:09) I, yeah. I mean, when I was watching this, I was thinking, Jesus, I wonder how much oil it took to make this movie. Because when you see a big production and they shot for something like six months, Speaker 1 (9:20) this Speaker 2 (9:20) is an eco-disaster as well as a cinematic disaster. Well, that's the satire upon Speaker 1 (9:25) the satire. Yeah, Speaker 2 (9:25) yeah, yeah. So he is an event director in Uitu. So in terms of how it got made... Mike and Pam, they were known for big swing originals. They kind of said it. They have an incredible cast. I do believe that, I was saying to my husband when we got out, they must have gone home every night and said, what the hell are we making? Speaker 1 (9:48) Do you think they did? What do you think Tom Cruise and Inuritu did? No, no, no. The rest of the cast are like, he's Speaker 2 (9:54) a genius, it's Tom Cruise, they're going to get away with it, aren't they? Maybe this is Speaker 1 (9:58) amazing. Speaker 2 (9:59) Maybe this is amazing. Maybe this is Speaker 1 (10:00) actually what we've all done. things where we've been in studio and thought it was brilliant and all done things where we've been in studio thought it was terrible and neither of those things ever have any impact at all on what it actually is so you can definitely go back to your hotel in the evening and go like this is like one of the actors just phoning home talking to the husband just going yeah I am enjoying it I think it's it's quite hard to see clearly he's got a vision he's Speaker 2 (10:28) a genius Speaker 1 (10:28) he's a Speaker 2 (10:28) genius he gets away with it always does so what it's Speaker 1 (10:30) going to be so for me I'm Some of it is going over my head slightly and some of the shots and the script I find slightly opaque. But you know what? I'm going with it. Yeah, Speaker 2 (10:43) because we all are. We're Speaker 1 (10:44) all Speaker 2 (10:44) going in it because Tom is very intense at the centre of it. Speaker 1 (10:48) Tom thinks this is going to be huge. Speaker 2 (10:51) And who knows cinema like Mr. Tom Cruise? And he's Speaker 1 (10:54) smarter than us. So listen, I'm just going to get some room service, get my head down and pop out there again next week. I want to say, Richard, that Speaker 2 (11:01) I would read a full oral history on every aspect about how this got made, what it was like during the making of it. Can I Speaker 1 (11:08) say about how it got made, by the way, that I think is a positive thing. So this will definitely, if it's not the biggest flop of all time, it goes on the list, right? Alongside, you know, the Eddie Murphy thing, Adventures of Pluto and Ash. cutthroat ireland john carter all these big big movies that did nothing this one is an attempt to make, as you say, Doctor Strangelove or Citizen Kane or something like that. At least they're not attempting just to make a feel-good movie and it fails and they lose $150 million. At least they're going, why don't we make a standout... piece of cinema that's going to last forever and we'll lose 150 million on that and said I'd almost rather this was the flop like this is a better flop than the Marvels you know it's better for the world that this is the flop I like I disagree Speaker 2 (11:56) I wonder whether when the Marvels fails people are like why don't we just make some movies that cost 60 million and are really interesting whereas when this happens everyone's like I'll tell you what why don't we just make some really commercial like why don't we just make Days of Thunder 2 which we're going to get to oh Speaker 1 (12:09) I definitely think that the impact of this is worse because it makes it harder to make these movies. But I think that the impetus for it was better. I think, as you say, that Mike and Pam had had this series of hit movies that came out of nowhere. They liked working with auteurs. Hollywood is kind of going, perhaps we can make one last great movie, a movie that is... just Hollywood royalty where we throw all the money at it, we film it in the most beautiful way possible. We do everything we've always loved about cinema. We do all of that stuff at the same time with the very, very best people. We get the best director, we get the best film star. The other cast is amazing. John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Berne Gorman, there's all these brilliant actors. Sandra Huller. So they're thinking, okay, we are absolutely going to go for it. And yet... It absolutely failed. But that's a better failure, I think. As you say, though, I think the impact is worse. We'll get on to what now happens in Hollywood. And if you are, there'll be people, O2, sitting on kind of passion projects now who are like, oh, great. I've got Speaker 2 (13:16) to Speaker 1 (13:16) wait another five years. Speaker 2 (13:18) Yeah. In terms of what happens with the film, they're