Tom Cruise is experiencing one of the worst box office debuts of his career with the Oscar vehicle, Digger.
The ensemble political satire, written and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, has already divided critics: some praise the swings, while others focus on the misses.
Even more alarming is the $8 million opening weekend in North America, with only a further $12 million from international markets.
Cruise is staring at a box office bomb, possibly one of the largest of his career, yes, even bigger than when The Mummy lost Universal $95 million and killed Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’ franchise.
How did we get here?
Digger’s ambiguous marketing campaign has been confounding.
Other than knowing Cruise is an egotistical billionaire oil tycoon, called Digger Rockwell, audiences have had little to go on.
Equally confounding is the $160 million to $180 million price tag this film cost to produce.
That means Digger needs at least $300 million to break even.
Instead, it’s looking at a $150 million loss.
It’s the latest auteur-backed box office failure from outgoing Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy.
De Luca and Abdy are making way amid David Ellison’s impending merger of Paramount and Warner Bros.
Digger’s box office failure, combined with similar misfires in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.
At least the last of those won Best Picture, which is unlikely to happen for Digger at this stage.
Where do Cruise and Warner Bros. go from here?
Box office numbers, for once, will be inconsequential to Cruise when it comes to Digger.
For him, the film has been a long build-up to March’s Oscars, where the veteran actor hopes to get his hands on an Academy Award.
That could still happen for Cruise.
Also, he has Days of Thunder 2 to catapult him back into big box office territory; Digger could be a blip on the radar.
For Warner Bros., Digger is the final signal to Ellison that will convince him not to back auteur filmmakers with blockbuster budgets.
The likes of DC and Days of Thunder will be more his style.
So will Warner Bros. stop backing artistic filmmakers entirely?
Hopefully not.
The studio has a new arm called Clockwork.
Warner Bros. Clockwork is an indie-focused endeavour.
Its first release will be from Oscar-winning Anora director Sean Baker, and Warner Bros. Clockwork has snagged Noah Baumbach from Netflix.
So, while you probably won’t see massive budgets thrown at auteurs by Warner Bros., save for Ryan Coogler, perhaps, these types of filmmakers won’t disappear from the studio’s slate altogether.
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