Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ has opened to an exceptionally difficult commercial start, but its response from fellow performers and filmmakers is anything but unanimous dismissal. Anne Hathaway, Jane Fonda, Guillermo del Toro and Mandy Patinkin are among the prominent voices publicly urging audiences to give the Alejandro G. Iñárritu film a chance. Their praise arrives after the movie earned $8 million domestically in its opening week and $20 million globally, figures that put enormous pressure on a release reported to carry a production budget of $160 million to $180 million, plus roughly $100 million in marketing.
The immediate split is central to the story. ‘Digger’ is not being received as a quiet, broadly liked crowd-pleaser that happened to miss its audience. It has instead generated sharply opposed reactions: some viewers and industry peers call it artistically daring, while others consider it a major misfire. That divide does not alter the opening revenue, but it does explain why its defense has been so emphatic—and why the conversation is now as much about risk in big-studio filmmaking as it is about a weekend’s ticket sales.
A high-profile defense of an unpopular box-office result
Hathaway gave the film one of its clearest endorsements, describing it as intelligent, disorienting, forceful, funny and ambitious. Her core argument was not that everyone will have the same response, but that it merits viewers’ time and an individual judgment. She rated it 10 out of 10.
Patinkin went further, calling ‘Digger’ an instant classic and one of the greatest films he has seen. His praise focused on a sense that the movie reconnects with what he values in cinema, while directly imploring people to see it theatrically.
Del Toro’s succinct message—“Love the arts. Fuck the charts.”—made the underlying disagreement plain. Box-office charts are a measurement of ticket sales, not an automatic artistic verdict. At the same time, they matter a great deal to studios and exhibitors because they help determine whether a hugely expensive theatrical release can recoup its costs. The phrase works as a defense of artistic evaluation independent of commercial outcome, rather than a claim that the commercial outcome is unimportant to the people who financed the movie.
Fonda similarly encouraged Cruise and Iñárritu to remain bold. She praised Cruise’s commitment to a role that departs from his recent screen persona and argued that the film takes an unusual route into climate-crisis subject matter. She also expressed hope that audience word of mouth could build interest.
That distinction matters. Word of mouth is the informal audience-to-audience recommendation that can sometimes improve a film’s performance after opening weekend. It is not the same as a guarantee of a turnaround, especially when the starting numbers are low relative to the reported cost. Here, it is better understood as the remaining case being made by the movie’s supporters: a polarizing film can still find a more receptive audience after its first rush of reviews and headlines.
What ‘Digger’ asks of Cruise
‘Digger’ was presented as Cruise’s first non-action role in nearly a decade. He plays Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon confronting an apocalyptic disaster after a malfunction at one of his Antarctic rigs sends ice caps toward Europe and beyond.
That premise combines a powerful industrial figure, environmental catastrophe and large-scale destruction. Fonda’s response suggests she sees the film’s climate angle not as background dressing but as part of its intended provocation. Her praise of Cruise specifically centers on his willingness to take a risk with the part and commit fully to it.
For an actor identified so strongly with action spectacle, “non-action” does not necessarily mean small-scale or low-stakes. In this case, the reported premise is still enormous in scope. The difference is that Cruise’s character is framed as a tycoon facing the consequences of a disaster, rather than the conventional action lead racing to prevent it. Supporters see that switch as a meaningful act of range and vulnerability; detractors, based on the sharply divided reception, clearly do not agree that the film’s chosen approach works.
The debate also fits a larger pop-culture question: how much patience should audiences and studios have for expensive films that are aggressively strange, difficult or uneven? That issue comes up often when established stars, familiar franchises and returning icons meet high expectations. For a separate look at why legacy casting can reshape a blockbuster’s emotional stakes, see our discussion of the original X-Men and ‘Avengers: Doomsday’.
Why the financial math looks so severe
The commercial picture described for ‘Digger’ is stark. With a reported $160 million to $180 million production budget and an additional $100 million marketing spend, estimates put the worldwide theatrical threshold for breaking even at about $350 million. Against a $20 million global start, reaching that mark now appears extraordinarily unlikely.
Break-even means the point at which revenue is sufficient to cover costs. It should not be confused with a movie merely earning back its production budget in ticket sales. The reported $350 million figure accounts for the reality that marketing can be enormous for a wide release and that theatrical revenue is not simply identical to a studio’s return. This is why a film with a nine-figure production budget can need far more than that amount in worldwide grosses to be financially whole from its theatrical run.
The reported outlook is for a theatrical loss of at least $150 million to $200 million. Those are estimates, not a final accounting, and the supplied figures concern theatrical performance. But they illustrate the gulf between the project’s scale and its current gross. A strong second weekend or persistent audience conversation could improve the final total without changing the broad challenge posed by that gap.
It is also worth separating two ideas that are frequently mashed together online. A box-office bomb is a commercial label tied to costs and revenue; it is not a review score. A polarizing film is an artistic and audience-response description, meaning its viewers are far apart in their assessments. ‘Digger’ can be both: commercially imperiled by its opening while still inspiring genuine, intense admiration from people who see its excesses and risks as virtues.
Artistic advocacy does not erase the disagreement
The public support behind ‘Digger’ is notable because it does not attempt to pretend the reaction has been uniform. Hathaway’s recommendation is built around making up one’s own mind. Fonda characterizes its creative method as risky. Del Toro dismisses the idea that sales charts should settle an artistic argument. Each response accepts, explicitly or implicitly, that the film is unlikely to land the same way for every viewer.
That is a more useful frame than treating the endorsements as proof that critics or audiences are simply wrong. Famous admirers can explain what they found rewarding—its aggression, humor, ambition, climate focus or Cruise’s departure from action—but they cannot eliminate another viewer’s objections. The divided response is the point: the film has inspired people to argue for it with unusual force.
There is an economic tension in that argument. Large-budget original or unconventional work often requires the very commercial scale that makes a weak opening so punishing. Advocating for daring movies means accepting that some will create discomfort, confusion or rejection rather than immediate consensus. Conversely, the size of a budget makes it reasonable to ask whether the industry has built a model that can support risk without placing extraordinary financial expectations on a single theatrical launch.
Nothing in the current numbers resolves that tension. They do, however, make the public statements from Hathaway, Fonda, Del Toro and Patinkin more than routine social-media compliments. They are defenses of a film’s artistic value at the exact moment its financial value is being judged most harshly.
Cruise’s response focuses on the people who made it
Cruise addressed the release during opening weekend with a message of gratitude to the cast and crew. He said making the film had been an honor, thanked the team for its work and joy, and said he was proud of what they created.
It is a response that does not try to litigate the reviews or the revenue. Instead, it centers the collaborative work behind the production. In the context of the response from his peers, that choice reinforces the same broad idea: for the people defending ‘Digger,’ its value lies in the commitment to making an ambitious, unusual film, even as its theatrical prospects look bleak.
Whether that defense encourages a meaningful late audience discovery remains uncertain. What is already clear is that ‘Digger’ has become a test case for two competing ways of talking about major studio movies. One begins with the opening gross and the likely losses. The other begins with the work on screen, the creative risk behind it and the possibility that a film can be divisive without being disposable.
