Tom Cruise's new climate-themed film "Digger" pulled in $1.2 million in Thursday night previews. For context, "Top Gun: Maverick" — Cruise's last film where he played a character Americans actually wanted to root for — went on to gross nearly $1.5 billion worldwide.
"Digger" opened Friday to $3.4 million, including those previews.
The film, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and distributed by Warner Bros., was originally budgeted at $125 million. It ballooned to $160 million. Cruise plays Curtis Markson, a billionaire oil tycoon whose accident triggers a Greenland ice shelf to break off and head toward Europe. John Goodman plays the U.S. President. The plot includes a stage production called "Fossil Fools" — which is either a subplot or an accurate description of the investors who greenlit this thing.
Variety projected a $12 to $15 million opening weekend. The actual tracking now puts it closer to $10 million domestically across 3,300-plus theaters in North America. The audience gave it a C+ CinemaScore.
Hollywood has been trying to make climate change into compelling blockbuster entertainment for years, and the market keeps returning the same verdict. The pitch meeting probably sounded bulletproof: biggest movie star on the planet, Oscar-winning director of "Birdman" and "The Revenant," $160 million in production value. The only thing missing was a story that people who buy movie tickets actually wanted to see.
The studio logic here is worth examining. Warner Bros. looked at a project where Tom Cruise — an actor whose brand is built on fighter jets, impossible missions, and death-defying stunts — would play a villain oil tycoon in a movie about ice shelves collapsing. Someone in a corner office decided that was worth $160 million of shareholder money. Then, when the budget ran $35 million over the original estimate, they kept going.
Cruise can open a movie. He proved that four years ago with "Maverick." But "Maverick" succeeded because it was a film about an American doing something extraordinary, not a lecture about how Americans are destroying the planet.
But when the premise of a movie is a $160 million guilt trip about fossil fuels, it doesn't matter how talented the people starring in it or directing it are. Audiences can smell a sermon from the trailer, and they've gotten very good at staying home.