The latest weekend box office estimates have arrived, and for some, they aren’t particularly good, specifically for Tom Cruise. As Digger marks a return to auteur-driven work, Cruise now has an $8M domestic, $20M global worldwide opening attached to a $180M pricetag to his name.
Digger (photo credit: WB).
This is Cruise’s first non-franchise work since American Made a decade ago, and the film, at least in our opinion, is extremely strong. However, the concept of “Dr. Strangelove meets Aaron Sorkin-style snap dialogue meets Wes Anderson’s style, with the director of Birdman doing Birdman things” was never going to be an easy sell, and it never seemed as though Warner Bros was up for the task on this one. This started with a Tom Cruise for-your-consideration sizzle reel, which was a bit on the nose for a project that always seemed to be Cruise’s Oscar vehicle. The last time Cruise was up for an Academy Award would have been 1999’s Magnolia, also a financial flop at a time when Cruise was considered the biggest movie strar in Hollywood. Alejandro Inarritu as the director, best known for the director who made Michael Keaton win-competitive and scored the victory for Leonardo DiCaprio, was attached with a very bold vision that gave his actors a lot to work with, and Cruise does deliver an Academy Award caliber performance, but at no point did Warner even try to even market what was actually in the film, somewhat understandably with how many twists there are, but didn’t even realize they had the next Babylon on their hands until the critic embargo lifted. To do your best marketing work after the film is already out is not a strong sign in your marketing team. Unfortunately, this’ll be another in a long line of the ‘we want original movies’ crowd not showing up for an original film, and will likely push Cruise back into franchise fare immediately. Not that Cruise’s franchise fare is firing on all cylinders right now, with both of the final two Mission Impossible films underperforming, but at least in the case of Dead Reckoning, COVID ballooned the budget on what otherwise would have been profitable. We aren’t ready to say that Tom Cruise is any less of a movie star due to the underperformance of Digger.
In fact, there’s this excerpt looking ahead at the films potential from the Box Office Report last week.
Having seen the movie, this movie does not make more money if you put quite literally any other actor in there. But there is a film in there that lost money called One Battle After Another. That film, a film that’s very prescient in its politics and is more about the father/daughter story than anything else, had utilized its action aspects to be marketed as an action movie in an era where standard action movies don’t make a ton of money. This is the same marketing team behind Digger. While Abdy and DeLuca’s film catalogue was very strong, but outside of Sinners, none of their films made any money, and none of them were marketed very well. Who knows if The Bride was ever going to make money, but you can’t market the concept of Mickey 17? The end of the run is a whimper for Warner and the Abdy/DeLuca regime, but creator-first studioheads spent years greenlighting original, risky films that ended up being something uniquely new, and Digger represents that through and through, so as Skydance goes back to the tried-and-true well for more of the same, the audiences have spoken, and they’d rather bitch about a lack of originality in film than actually support seeing originality in film. Regardless, the projected $220M loss won’t hurt Warner Bros, because it’s now going to be felt by a Skydance company that was already set to be in ~$90B in debt with $12M a day accumulating in interest per day before factoring in their junk grade stock skyrocketing operating costs…and then they took out another $44B in debt bonds to even afford the closing. Suffice to say, when you’re going to be in over $100B in debt with no way of paying it down, what’s a $220M loss actually hurting?
With Digger finishing fifth, the best newcomer this week ended up being Verity. This isn’t too much of a surprise, as Colleen Hoover and Anne Hathaway have been dominating the box office in recent memory with their female-driven films, so Anne Hathaway starring in a Colleen Hoover adaptation? It’s like printing money if you’re Amazon MGM, who, while they’ve had some flops, they’ve been smaller flops. Is God Is didn’t break the bank, and The Sheep Detectives was at least able to do better than its budget. With the success of Project Hail Mary, now Verity, and what we assume will be a breakout hit in I Play Rocky, Amazzon has made more than enough this year to absorb its smaller losses, and the quality level of those losses have done a very good job training audiences to expect a good movie when Amazon goes theatrical, which for a new player in the space is ultimately the goal. The only real failure this year is Masters of the Universe, which we spoke in detail on in the early editions of the Box Office Report. Verity making its budget back in the opening weekend should cruise to a profit, marking once again that the mid-budget female-driven film is a moneymaker in 2026.
Rounding out the top five, we have three holdovers we discussed at length last week.Resident Evil is still bringing audiences, with a $12M+ weekend, while Heart of the Beast and Primetime continue to perform nearly identically from a domestic standpoint, with only $3M separating their weekend. The two films are targeting very different age demographics, allowing them to supplement each other rather than cannibalize each other. A24’s Hansen biopic is already firmly into profit territory unlike the Pitt survival thriller thanks to their budgets, but Heart of the Beast is legging out extraordinarily well overseas, and should cruise to a profit thanks to how much Pitt’s name value still plays in European markets. This should cross the $100M mark by Tuesday with a 40/60 split. That’s still only halfway to profitability point though, so we’ll see where this legs out to.
The biggest non-Cruise story of the weekend is Avengers: Endgame The Encore. The re-release finished seventh at the box office in its second weekend, behind even Forgotten Island, a film that feels forgotten on its own little island. However, it did do well enough to overtake the original Avatar to once again become the highest-grossing film in box office history, a position the two have traded. The real winner here is Zoe Saldana, whether she’s green as Gamora or blue as Neytiri, she’s at the top of this list. While it’s certainly a big deal to be the highest-grossing film ever, and the re-release being so popular shows a reverence for the experience of the film, and, not to be that guy, but also the Swift-ification of how we consume media, there’s very little new to say about Endgame beyond audiences loved it 3000. The more fascinating thing here is that the encore plays into Doomsday, and after the success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, what is the ceiling for Avengers: Doomsday in December?
Looking ahead to next week, not much seems to be coming out which should give Verity an opportunity to continue doing well, but Other Mommy is hitting theatres in a time where a video game IP is the only horror film to go see. Jessica Chastain may not be the biggest star in Hollywood, but she’s been one of its strongest thespians and one of its most fascinating project-pickers this generation, and the film seems to be extremely creepy. This could play as another breakout horror hit in a massive year for horror.
Jameus Mooney is an entertainment writer for Comicbook Clique, having covered the entertainment industry for years. You can follow him on Twitter here, and Letterboxd here. You can also listen to his horror podcast, The 2:17 Horror Podcast, at the DeathArts XIII YouTube channel.