Tom Cruise Plays an Oil Tycoon and the Crowd Stays Home

Tom Cruise has headlined some of the biggest hits in American movies for four decades. This past weekend, he opened a picture in more than 3,300 North American theaters and took in roughly $8 million.

The movie is Digger, a satire from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu in which Cruise plays an oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell. In a box-office report by Anthony D'Alessandro, Deadline put the opening as Cruise's weakest since Lions for Lambs in 2007, which debuted at $6.7 million, and reported a C+ CinemaScore — the grade moviegoers themselves give on the way out, and a number that usually predicts a hard fall in week two. We were unable to load the Deadline pages directly and are working from search excerpts of that reporting, so the figures attributed to Deadline here should be read as secondhand pending a direct check.

The weekend's winner was Amazon MGM's Verity, an adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel directed by Michael Showalter and starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett. It opened at about $33.6 million in 3,510 theaters on a reported $40 million budget, The Hollywood Reporter noted. It also drew a C+ from audiences. The difference is that Verity cost a fraction of what Digger did.

The Numbers, and the Numbers Nobody Agrees On

The figures on the board are these: $1.2 million in Thursday previews, roughly $3.3 million to $3.4 million for Friday including those previews, and about $8 million for the three days. Warner Bros. had been looking at a $12 million to $15 million opening before the weekend, per The Hollywood Reporter; the tracking firm Boxoffice Pro had it closer to $8 million, which is where it landed. Deadline is reported to have found the audience skewing heavily young and male — about 60 percent between 18 and 34, more than 70 percent men — with premium large-format screens accounting for 28 percent of the gross and no IMAX run at all. The top single theater in the country was AMC Lincoln Square in Manhattan at $36,300. Those audience, PLF and single-location numbers all come from the same secondhand Deadline excerpts.

What the picture actually cost is murkier, and readers should treat the loss estimates flying around with caution. The Hollywood Reporter has put the production budget at $125 million. Variety has reported it climbing as high as $180 million. Breitbart News columnist John Nolte argued the all-in figure with marketing is closer to $250 million and projected a loss near $150 million, but his $70 million marketing estimate is his own and carries no sourcing. Warner Bros. has not put out a budget number, and the opening weekend itself is still fluid pending Sunday and Monday actuals.

Critics Split, Conservatives Pounce

The reviews were mixed rather than brutal: 51 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a 45 on Metacritic. Deadline's Pete Hammond is quoted as calling the film "unlike any film coming from a major Hollywood studio in years," a line that can be read more than one way, and one we have likewise not yet confirmed against the original page.

At National Review, Armond White's review carries the subhead that Iñárritu pairs Cruise with "an unwieldy climate-crisis satire that leaves its politics deliberately unstable." The full text sits behind the magazine's wall, so the argument beyond the headline and dek is not something we can characterize here.

Nolte's column was blunter, treating the result as a verdict on Hollywood's appetite for lecturing its customers. "Lunacy and hate are not a profitable business plan," he wrote. That is a column, not a finding, and the box office alone cannot separate message fatigue from a confusing marketing campaign, a crowded October, or a star vehicle that simply looked like homework. Nolte did note that several other titles this year — Novacaine, Nobody 2, M3GAN 2.0 and the Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere among them — all opened above $8 million.

Cruise Isn't Apologizing

Cruise went to Instagram over the weekend, in a post Deadline is reported to have relayed. "I'm so proud of what we created," he wrote, adding that he was "so honored to have had the opportunity to create this film alongside such talented artists." No mention of grosses. That is roughly what a star does when a film he believes in lands short, and it is also the opening move of an awards-season campaign.

The backdrop is awkward for Warner Bros. The Hollywood Reporter has reported that film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are on their way out of the studio, though THR did not tie that departure to this release, and nobody should assume a connection that hasn't been drawn.

Next up: final weekend actuals, a second-weekend drop that a C+ grade tends to make steep, the international rollout, and whether Warner Bros. pivots Digger from a wide commercial play to a prestige campaign aimed at voters rather than ticket buyers.