Tomorrow, October 2, Tom Cruise stops running. He starts digging.
Digger, Alejandro G. Inarritu’s satirical black comedy for Warner Bros., opens in theaters and IMAX this Friday, and it might be the strangest big swing a major studio has taken in years. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, described as the most powerful man in the world: an aging oil tycoon who sets off on a frantic mission to prove he can save humanity from the very disaster his drilling unleashed. The tagline says it all. A comedy of catastrophic proportions.
If that sounds like a lot, good. It is supposed to.
The setup
The film is a Legendary Pictures production, directed by Inarritu from a screenplay he wrote with Oscar winners Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolas Giacobone, his Birdman collaborators, plus Sabina Berman. The story is credited to Berman, Inarritu and Jez Butterworth. It runs 129 minutes, cost somewhere between $160 and $180 million, and was shot entirely in VistaVision, the wide, lush format Inarritu favors.
The premise reads like a dare. The richest man alive breaks the planet, then demands credit for trying to fix it. Around him orbits an ensemble that most directors would trade a kidney for: Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons, with Emma D’Arcy, Sophie Wilde, Robert John Burke and Burn Gorman in support. Behind the camera, the cavalry is just as stacked: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, editors Stephen Mirrione and Conor O’Neill, production designer Dennis Gassner, composer Cosmo Sheldrake. Count the Oscars in that paragraph and you will run out of fingers.
Why this one is fascinating
This is Cruise’s first film under the Warner Bros. deal he signed in January 2026, and his first real collaboration with the studio since Edge of Tomorrow more than a decade ago. It is also Inarritu’s first English-language feature since The Revenant. Two heavyweights, both overdue for a new chapter, choosing to make a wild comedy about an oil baron trying to outrun his own mess. Nobody saw this coming, which is exactly the point.
Inarritu has described the shoot as joyful chaos. At Cannes he called it “insane” and said Cruise made him laugh every day, praising a comic range he had never seen from the star. A poster designed by artist Ed Ruscha was recently celebrated at LACMA. The studio is treating this like an event, not a release.
Early reactions are genuinely divided, and Warner Bros. is leaning into it. A new ad runs contradictory pull quotes side by side: masterpiece next to unpleasant, brilliant next to baffling, tied together with the line “Same film, different truth.” You can read that as marketing spin or as honesty. Either way, it takes confidence to sell a movie this way.
A comedy built like an epic
The craft here deserves its own paragraph. Inarritu shot the film over six months in the United Kingdom, entirely in VistaVision, a format that gives the image a depth and grain modern digital rarely manages. Lubezki’s involvement alone guarantees it will look like nothing else in the multiplex this fall. Even the marketing has an art-house streak: the key poster was designed by renowned American artist Ed Ruscha and was recently celebrated at LACMA, which is not a sentence you usually write about a Tom Cruise vehicle.
Cruise himself looks unrecognizable in the materials released so far: paunchy, weathered, clutching a decrepit cat on the poster. For a star whose brand is control, letting himself look this undone is the boldest special effect in the movie.
Should you go?
Here is the case for yes. Studios do not make $170 million original comedies anymore. They make sequels, and prequels, and sequels to prequels. When one of the last true movie stars and one of the great living directors decide to spend that kind of money on something nobody asked for, the only correct response is curiosity. The worst version of this movie is still more interesting than the safest franchise entry of the year.
See it big if you can. Lubezki shooting VistaVision is reason enough, and whatever you think of the satire, you will not be bored. Cruise, famously, does not do bored.
Make a day of it. Grab one of NYC’s best breakfast sandwiches before the show, then argue about the ending over hot chicken after. Digger opens October 2 in theaters and IMAX. Go decide for yourself.
