Tom Cruise says he’s still digging his big-budget film Digger after it bombed in its opening weekend.
Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s dark satire, which carried a $125 million production budget, opened to just $8 million at the box office over the weekend, becoming Cruise’s lowest opening in nearly two decades.
Cruise, 64, has not scraped this low at the box office since 2007, when his war drama Lions for Lambs opened to $6.7 million—though its $35 million budget was a fraction of Digger’s.
The Warner Bros. production, which stars Cruise as a balding, overweight oil tycoon whose drilling goes disastrously wrong, also ranks among the year’s biggest box-office disappointments for any studio.
But the actor, who had heavily promoted the political satire on social media, played it cool in an Instagram post on Sunday.
“DIGGER is officially in theaters and I am so honored to have had the opportunity to create this film alongside such talented artists,” he wrote. “Thank you to the entire cast and crew for your dedication, hard work, and joy. The experience was truly unforgettable and I’m so proud of what we created.”
Cruise had laid his hopes out for the movie at a screening for Producers Guild of America members last week, saying, “I hope the film does well so other people receive and make money, everyone gets Christmas bonuses, and then they can go on, and other films like this can get made.”
But teaming up with Iñárritu, who became only the third director in Oscar history (after John Ford and Joseph L. Mankiewicz) to win back-to-back Best Director awards for Birdman and The Revenant in 2015 and 2016, also seemed like an obvious bid to finally land Cruise an acting Oscar.
The reviews have delivered a sobering reality check.
Digger has scraped just 51 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, making it Cruise’s worst-reviewed movie in nearly a decade.
According to the Daily Beast’s Nick Schager, the film is “a tedious satire, slamming capitalistic greed, anti-environmental profiteering, rampant corruption, and horrid narcissism with all the bluntness of the shovel its protagonist reveres.”
