Film — Noozify Original — October 14, 2026

Digging for Oscar Gold: Tom Cruise's $125 Million Gamble

By Dan Chafetz

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Hollywood runs on a durable superstition, the belief that a famous face, paired with a prestigious director, functions as a kind of insurance policy. Digger, the Warner Bros. satire that reached theaters on October 2nd, has put that superstition to an expensive test. The question it raises is simple. What, precisely, is a movie star for?

The setup is easy enough to summarize, and the trailers have already done so. Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an aging oil magnate whose drilling in Greenland dislodges an ice shelf and threatens a global catastrophe. What follows is a frantic campaign to convince the world that the man who caused the disaster is the only one who can end it. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and shot entirely in VistaVision, the R-rated black comedy is, according to the studio's own materials, a collaboration among a small army of Oscar winners, including cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.

Cruise is almost unrecognizable. Buried under prosthetics and white hair, with a paunch and the gait of an old Texan, he is in his first original film since American Made in 2017. The role is a conscious return to the era of Born on the Fourth of July and Magnolia, when, as Gulf News observed, he was as likely to chase a difficult part as a hit. Cruise himself told Reuters at the London premiere, "I've never read a character like it."

Whether he pulls it off depends on whom you ask. IndieWire's Jim Hemphill called it his best work since Magnolia, and a Swiss reviewer praised the way Digger commands, rages, and talks himself into trouble, while noting that the character never quite goes deep emotionally. A more skeptical Italian critic argued that a disguise cannot carry a film. Both camps, notably, agree that he is trying harder than he has in years.

The supporting players fare somewhat better. Riz Ahmed, cast as an environmental scientist, is the performance most often singled out. One reviewer likened him to a life raft for an audience surrounded by madness, and another has already floated him as an Oscar contender. John Goodman is deliberately over the top, and it works. Sandra Hüller, by general consensus, is underused, which is a small crime given what she can do with a minute of screen time.

The film as a whole earns the word ambitious more reliably than the word successful. IndieWire's Anne Thompson described a brave, handsome piece of art-house filmmaking better suited to Academy voters than to multiplex crowds, and the Rotten Tomatoes roundup captured the divide: some found a bold, visually inventive swing, others a pompous satire that, as one put it, simply isn't funny. The review aggregate has hovered in the low fifties, which makes it Cruise's worst-reviewed movie in nearly a decade. Iñárritu, to his credit, has not flinched, telling The New York Times that he'd take a divided response over the alternative: "I prefer that to the lukewarm reception."

The audience, however, did not so much divide as decline to appear. Digger opened to $8 million in the United States and Canada, good for fifth place, plus roughly $12 million abroad, for a worldwide debut near $20 million against a reported budget of $125 million or more. Its cumulative gross has since crept to about $37 million, a figure that will not trouble the break-even line. By any ordinary accounting, it is among the costliest disappointments of the year.

Digger was never only a bid for box office; it was, in no small part, an awards campaign, and the arithmetic of Cruise's career explains why. He has earned acting nominations for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia, plus a Best Picture nomination as a producer of Top Gun: Maverick, yet he has never won a competitive Oscar. The Academy did give him an honorary award at the 2025 Governors Awards, a gracious gesture that also, one suspects, sharpened his appetite for the real thing.

Pairing with Iñárritu looks, in retrospect, like careful strategy. One columnist, who described the role as a deliberate wager, observed that every Iñárritu film has earned Oscar nominations, with his actors nearly always among them. Cruise sounded like a man who understood the stakes when he told The Hollywood Reporter, "I have never had something that could challenge me in this way." Voters have historically warmed to physical transformation and heavy prosthetics, as Euronews pointed out, and Digger offers both in abundance.

The twist is that the campaign may have stalled before it began. Industry chatter placed Cruise outside the Best Actor race even before the review embargo lifted, and the critical split did little to repair that. A weak opening is not strictly disqualifying, since One Battle After Another won Best Picture and still lost money, but analyst Paul Dergarabedian noted that Cruise's presence "didn't automatically make it a Tom Cruise blockbuster", which hints that the film's intended audience was never the multiplex at all, only a few thousand voters.

That reframes the question we began with. A movie star may be less an insurance policy than a currency, earned at the box office and spent, if the holder is bold, on something no spreadsheet can price. Whether Digger buys Cruise that trophy is still unsettled, and even the columnist who called his work spectacular doubts he will even be nominated. But a man who spent decades guarding his image has just let a director bury it under prosthetics and cowboy boots, and that, at least, is a bet worth admiring.

Noozify's overall grade for Digger is a B, the average of four report-card grades on an A-to-F scale.