Tom Cruise‘s Digger begins a bumpy box office road as it opens theatrically amid a period of transition for the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group.
Digger collected $1.2 million domestically from Thursday previews ahead of opening this weekend in more than 3,300 North American locations. Warner Bros. expects a start in the range of $12 million to $15 million for the satire that carries a $125 million production budget.
Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s ambitious movie marks a big swing for the studio and star alike. Digger is unlike the recent action franchises for which Cruise has been known and harkens back to the more filmmaker-driven projects from earlier in his career, such as Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July and Magnolia. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman and Sandra Hüller also star in Digger, which centers on Cruise’s audacious oil tycoon grappling with having started a natural disaster.
Warner Bros. sees this as an awards play and hopes for legs through word of mouth, although critics have been split, as Digger holds a 52 percent approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes reviewers. In his review for The Hollywood Reporter, chief film critic David Rooney wrote that the film “ultimately just prompts a worn-down shrug.”
The film arrives in theaters amid news having broken that Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are exiting the studio. The move comes ahead of Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. that is likely to be finalized Oct. 6, with Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein expected to oversee the film side for both studios. De Luca and Abdy had a glittery 2025, highlighted by the Oscar wins for such celebrated titles as One Battle After Another and Sinners, although the conversation surrounding this year’s output has been dominated by high-profile misses like The Bride! and Supergirl.
Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett in Verity.
Alisha Wetherill/Amazon MGM Studios
Meanwhile, Amazon MGM Studios’ Verity is expected to take the top spot over the weekend as spooky season begins. Launching Friday in 3,510 North American theaters, Verity grossed $4.5 million from Thursday previews. The studio projects an opening in the range of $27 million to $30 million for filmmaker Michael Showalter’s thriller that carries a $40 million production budget. Starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, Verity adapts Colleen Hoover’s novel about struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson) taking a gig as a ghostwriter for acclaimed author Verity Crawford (Hathaway).
Its previews total marks the second-best sum for a Hoover feature adaptation, behind the $7 million for Sony’s embattled 2024 offering It Ends With Us that notched an opening weekend of $50 million domestically. Last year, Universal’s adaptation of Hoover’s Reminders of Him collected $1.9 million in previews on its way to a $17.9 million domestic opening weekend.
Verity holds a challenging 39 percent Rotten Tomatoes score from reviewers. Critic Richard Lawson wrote for THR that the movie “careens off a cliff, plummeting past so-bad-it’s-good and crashing on the rocks of agonizingly dumb.”
