The final trailer for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger features Tom Cruise in full character actor mode, plus an animatronic cat.
Update: Tom Cruise is set to provide one of his most unrecognisable performances since Tropic Thunder’s Les Grossman in Digger, the latest film from Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
The marketing was previously a bit coy about what the film was about or even Cruise’s role in it. Now it’s clear that we’re in for a kind of Dr Strangelove for the climate crisis age; Cruise plays the titular Digger, a Texas oil man whose massive reserves of fossil fuel wealth have made him one of the most powerful people in the world.
Then a disaster at one of his extraction sites places him at the centre of a global ecological crisis, and much scheming, planning and panicking ensues.
Iñárritu isn’t afraid to take creative risks with his films, whether it’s the one-shot photography of Birdman or the freezing conditions endured during the making of another of his Oscar-winners, The Revenant.
Here, the risk may be tonal: we’re in for a broad black comedy here, again like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. But will Cruise’s big performance – which looks a little like the star doing an impression of Bob Odenkirk playing a fuel tycoon – prove a little draining after two hours or so? Alternatively, will this febrile comedy about greedy people destroying our planet hit a nerve with audiences?
We’ll find out in a matter of weeks: Digger hits cinemas on the 2nd October.
Our previous story follows…
24th June 2026: Here’s an unusual way to market a film. A new teaser trailer for Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s forthcoming black comedy, Digger, spends roughly two and a half minutes basking in the legacy of its leading man, Tom Cruise – and about 15 seconds showing us his new film.
We get quick cuts of everything from Top Gun to Rain Man to Born On The Fourth Of July to Magnolia to the Mission: Impossibles. Unless we blinked and missed it, there’s nothing from his generation-defining genre piece, The Mummy, though.
The aim, clearly, is to position Digger as the latest must-see performance for a movie star whose legacy stretches back to the Reagan era. Originally screening before revival releases of Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick, it’s also designed to entice audiences who are already predisposed to liking Cruise films. It’s the Amazon shop front approach to promotion: customers who liked these movies may also like Iñárritu’s Digger.
So what exactly is Iñárritu’s Digger? From what we can gather, it’s a dark disaster comedy in the mould of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. Cruise plays the title character, Digger Rockwell, the “most powerful man in the world” who tries to save the planet from some sort of natural disaster – according to World of Reel, the source of the trouble is a gigantic iceberg.
We appear to be in for another big performance from Cruise – his Digger is a brash, ageing Texan with who grandstands and whoops from beneath a gigantic Stetson hat. The posters and trailer are playing coy over exactly what Digger looks like – in the clip, he’s shown from a long shot that means his face is tough to make out. In the posters, his features are either cropped out or obscured by the film’s title.
The film looks beautifully shot, as we’d expect from the director of such visually arresting pieces as Amores Perros, Babel and The Revenant. The Academy loves ‘transformative’ performances, and Cruise is clearly angling for an Oscar here. Will Digger‘s broad satire work for critics and audiences, or will Cruise’s turn edge a little too close to Les Grossman cartoonishness for comfort?
We don’t have long before we find out: Digger is due for release on the 2nd October 2026.
