Digger must out-gross all but one Iñárritu film to break even

Warner Bros says Digger cost $125m. Alejandro G. Iñárritu's six previous theatrically reported features have grossed $878.6m worldwide between them, over fifteen years, according to Box Office Mojo. That is an average of $146.4m a film, and only one of the six has ever cleared $200m.

The film premiered on Tuesday night at the Odeon Luxe in Leicester Square as this year's Royal Film Performance, with the Prince and Princess of Wales in the audience and the whole square dressed in set pieces from the production. Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon called Digger Rockwell whose drilling in Greenland dislodges an ice shelf. It opens internationally on 30 September and across North America on 2 October.

The rough test the industry uses is that a film needs two to two and a half times its production budget in worldwide ticket sales before anyone is in profit, because cinemas keep roughly half the gross and the marketing spend sits outside the production figure. Against $125m, that puts Digger somewhere north of $310m to get level.

Only The Revenant has ever done that for Iñárritu.

Three budgets and a $75m gap

The $125m figure is Warner Bros' own. A studio representative gave it to Puck's Matt Belloni, who published it with the caveat that he was "already suspicious" and had heard the final price was much higher.

The same representative gave the same $125m to Page Six's Ian Mohr. A studio source then told Mohr the film was "pushing $200 million", calling the situation "insane", as World of Reel reported in June. In August, Variety put the number at $130m.

So there are three figures in circulation and a $75m spread between the lowest and the highest. That gap on its own is larger than the entire worldwide gross of three of Iñárritu's six films: Amores Perros took $20.9m, Biutiful $25.1m and 21 Grams $60.5m.

A company being fought over does not want the $200m number in print. Warner Bros Discovery has spent this autumn as an acquisition target, and we have already gone through the arithmetic of what a Paramount takeover would demand of its release slate. A nine-figure original comedy is the first line item anyone looks at.

What an Iñárritu film actually makes

His record is short and unusually consistent. Amores Perros made $20.9m worldwide in 2000. 21 Grams made $60.5m. Babel made $135.3m. Biutiful made $25.1m. Birdman, which won best picture, made $103.2m against an $18m budget, which remains the most profitable thing he has directed.

Then there is The Revenant: $533.6m worldwide on a $135m budget, and the only film of his that has ever behaved like a blockbuster. His last feature, Bardo, went to Netflix in 2022, and Netflix does not report box office, so it sits outside the count entirely.

Put the two ends of the budget range against that record. At $125m, Digger needs more than twice the average Iñárritu gross. At $200m, break-even lands near $500m, which is very close to The Revenant's entire worldwide total, achieved with a best actor Oscar campaign for Leonardo DiCaprio and a Christmas Day release.

Digger opens against nothing of that kind. It is a satire about climate collapse with a lead in prosthetics.

Nine years since Cruise led an original

The last film Cruise carried that was not a sequel, a reboot or a franchise entry was American Made, released on 29 September 2017. It cost $50m, opened to $16.8m and finished on $134.9m worldwide.

That worldwide total is roughly what Warner Bros says Digger cost to make.

Everything since has been a known quantity: Mission: Impossible – Fallout in 2018, Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, then two more Mission: Impossible films. Cruise's box office record over the past decade is excellent and it is entirely built on titles audiences already knew. What a Tom Cruise original opens to in 2026 is a genuinely open question, and nobody has tested it in nine years.

The nearest recent comparison is One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson's thriller from September 2025. It cost somewhere between $130m and $175m depending on which report you take, and it finished on $200.3m worldwide, the first Anderson film to pass $100m at all. That was a career high by a distance. It was also short of break-even. Prestige originals at this budget have been losing money even when they work, as Ridley Scott found this month when The Dog Stars opened to $8m against a $70m budget.

The royal launch is not a forecast

The Royal Film Performance is a trademarked event run by the Film and Television Charity, and it happens rarely: Spectre in 2015, 1917 in 2019, Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, Gladiator II in 2024, Digger now.

The last one William and Catherine attended was also a Tom Cruise film. Top Gun: Maverick went on to take $1.5bn worldwide on a $177m budget. The most recent one before this, Gladiator II, finished on about $462m against a budget reported at $250m or more, and whether it made money is still argued about.

Cruise thanked the royals from the stage for what they do "for the arts, for this country and for the world", per Deadline. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, Emma D'Arcy, Sophie Wilde and Michael Stuhlbarg were all on the carpet. It was a very good night. Good nights do not sell tickets in Ohio.

The reactions split down the middle

First reactions after the screening went both ways. Anne Thompson called it "a brave and gorgeous art film that will not score with mainstream audiences but will play best for the Academy". Awards Radar's Joey Magidson called it a "mess" and said "not a whole lot works here". Critic Scott Menzel landed in between, describing it as "ambitious, messy and strange" and praising Cruise's comic timing. IndieWire collected the range.

Thompson's read is the one worth sitting with, because it describes a specific commercial shape: a film that voters admire and audiences skip. On an $18m budget that is Birdman, and Birdman was a triumph. On $125m it is a write-down, and on $200m it is one of the largest of the decade.

Digger reaches international screens on 30 September and North America on 2 October, on Imax, VistaVision and premium large formats, at 129 minutes. The first figure that settles any of this lands on Sunday 4 October.