Four years ago, Tom Cruise was hailed as a box office savior. Now he’s the face of one of the biggest blunders in recent memory.

At a time when it wasn’t clear whether movie theaters would survive the cultural and economic upheaval brought by COVID-19, “Top Gun: Maverick” grossed nearly $1.5 billion as audiences around the world flocked to see him reprise his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the fighter pilot that cemented him as a movie star in the 1980s.

But this weekend, Cruise suffered his worst opening weekend at the box office in 19 years with Warner Bros./Legendary’s “Digger,” a movie that focused much of its marketing around his star power, only for the audience to largely reject the offer of seeing him swap out the Navy pilot suit for garish pajamas, bolo ties and old-man makeup as Digger Rockwell, the Texas oilman who triggers a climate apocalypse.

A $20 million global opening against a $125 million+ budget before marketing leaves a likely $150 million-plus loss for Warner Bros. that will be inherited by Skydance along with the tens of billions in debt. Its domestic $8 million opening is the third-worst opening for a film starring Cruise that opened in 1,000+ locations, and it ranks among the top 20 lowest openings for a film with at least 3,300 locations.

Between “Maverick” and the “Mission: Impossible” films, Cruise had built his reputation as a box office titan by doing his own death-defying stunts, promising moviegoers not just escapism, but a brand of escapism that was wholly unique to him. The masses could put aside the troubles of reality for two hours to see this actor cling to planes and ride motorbikes off of cliffs knowing that he wasn’t doing it with the help of a green screen.

Not only does “Digger” lack such escapism, but writer-director Alejandro G. Iñárritu casts a critical eye on whether such escapism in the movies, even when leveled at those in power, actually blunts the possibility of meaningful social change. The combination of a different Cruise than audiences had seen in 15 years, a topical premise that was off-putting for many potential moviegoers and a budget that made success too high a bar contributed to it collapsing so quickly.

“Tom Cruise’s name cannot turn this abrasive, structurally abstract satire into a four-quadrant film. They were financing the pedigree but not the potential audience,” said Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock.

The marketing

The “Digger” campaign began with a cryptic teaser of a silhouetted, balding Cruise dancing with a shovel and promising a “comedy of catastrophic proportions.” Months later, it was followed up with a trailer that had only about 15 seconds of footage of Cruise from the film, instead showing a montage of the actor’s work in “Top Gun,” “A Few Good Men,” and other films from his four-decade career.

It was clear that Warner Bros. was going to sell “Digger” on its leading man, but the teaser intentionally obscured the plot. Finally, just ahead of the release of “The Odyssey,” the first proper trailer came out and revealed to the masses what the film was about … kind of.

It showed a balding, Texas-twanged Cruise barking at a scientist warning that a methane explosion is about to turn Digger Rockwell’s Greenland oil well into a climate disaster. Clips of said disaster were interspersed with John Goodman as a loudmouth President of the United States, and lines from Cruise such as “If we can’t control the course of nature, we can at least control the narrative” made Iñárritu’s goal of satirizing our MAGA-defined present perfectly clear.

And perhaps it was with that trailer, 11 weeks out from release, that the strategy of selling “Digger” off of Cruise fell apart. The actor may get his fourth Oscar nomination from his full-throated commitment to playing the title role; but going all-in on playing a character more reminiscent of Elon Musk than Ethan Hunt didn’t attract the masses who showed up for “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” last year.

After 15 years of promising audiences that if they showed up to a Tom Cruise movie, they’d see the A-lister performing real-world, death-defying stunts, “Digger” was asking them to show up to watch Cruise in heavy prosthetics inhabit an exaggerated character in a two-and-a-half-hour diatribe on climate change.

“‘Digger’ is the cinematic equivalent of fine dining, and with his biggest hit films, Tom Cruise has offered the cinematic equivalent of a burger,” said Rentrak analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “He’s played roles against his image in movies like ‘Tropic Thunder,’ but that was just a cameo. Here he was expected to carry the film in such an unconventional role.”

A tough premise

Films that have been explicitly about current events or difficult issues have been a hard sell theatrically over the last few years. The 2022 journalism drama “She Said,” which recounted the investigation that brought down Harvey Weinstein, was a far cheaper production than “Digger” with a $32 million budget, but it too was a bomb, grossing just $13.9 million worldwide.

“Origin,” Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling novel about the history of caste systems and their connection to the history of bigotry, only got a limited release that produced just $4.8 million at the box office. Too serious? How about Boots Riley’s “I Love Boosters,” a satire far more absurd and upbeat than “Digger” and which urges the working class to organize against the Digger Rockwells of the world? It opened to strong reviews on 1,750 locations earlier this year and only grossed $9.7 million, roughly half of Riley’s 2018 directorial debut, “Sorry to Bother You.”

Next weekend, Sony Pictures will send in “The Social Reckoning,” Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to “The Social Network” that takes a far more caustic approach to Mark Zuckerberg and social media. But while “The Social Network” opened to $22.7 million in 2010 and made $225 million worldwide, “The Social Reckoning” is tracking to possibly open even lower than “Digger” as projections are topping out at $7 million.

And then there’s the documentary space, where the Trump-friendly “Melania” got a wide release and made $16.6 million — enough to make it the highest-grossing non-music doc of the 2020s — while more socially-minded docs struggle to find any sort of theatrical release. “NAZA,” the acclaimed investigative doc into the actions of the IDF in Gaza, has made just over $85,000 over five days from its exclusive release at the IFC Center in New York. It will open in select cities on Oct. 9, but won’t get more than a very limited self-distributed release before being released for free on The Guardian’s site later this fall.

Put simply, audiences are not showing up to see these kinds of movies right now.

In the face of all of this, a big-budget film about a melting arctic, rising sea levels and the climate apocalypse caused by our use of fossil fuels was facing an extremely uphill battle no matter which actor was the leading man.

There is, of course, one film that somewhat managed to buck this trend, and ironically, it is another film that came from Warner Bros. and the auteur-friendly philosophy of its soon-to-exit film chiefs, Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy: the reigning Best Picture Oscar winner “One Battle After Another.”

Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie came out in the midst of the Trump Administration’s nationwide deportation spree, features an immigration enforcement raid on a California sanctuary city as its centerpiece and never shies away from its political commentary.

Crucially, though, its marketing didn’t hinge so specifically on its connection to modern socio-political events. While “One Battle” needed its awards-boosted post-theatrical revenue to turn a profit (it grossed $213 million globally against a $130 million budget), the film had its own jaw-dropping chase sequences and a lead performance by Leonardo DiCaprio who committed himself to a wider range of roles at the peak of his drawing power, including in Iñárritu’s highest-grossing film, “The Revenant,” which got him his long-awaited Oscar.

By contrast, seven of Cruise’s top 10 movies at the box office are “Mission: Impossible” films, with the exceptions being “Top Gun: Maverick,” “The War of the Worlds” and “The Last Samurai,” all films filled with edge-of-your-seat thrills and Cruise being his photogenic and bombastic self.

In fact, if you comb through Cruise’s filmography for a dramatic, stunt-free role that reached the box office levels that would have marked theatrical success for “Digger,” the only one that comes up is his supporting role opposite Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man,” which made $354 million in 1988.

“We’ve seen actors take big swings on roles that are outside of their comfort zone. Dwayne Johnson’s ‘The Smashing Machine’ is a recent example. But they almost never come with the price tag that ‘Digger’ has,” said Dergarabedian.

Under De Luca and Abdy, Warner Bros. never shied away from that big price tag. The chance to show Cruise in a way audiences had never seen before in a dark satire of our present and very possible future that features an Oscar-winning cinematographer working with VistaVision and top dollar production design is right up the alley of a certain breed of hardcore cinema lovers.

But it was Cruise’s involvement that gave this film any hope of making its money back, and as this weekend showed, the overlap between those cinephiles and the global fanbase who want to see him run across buildings rather than play detestable elderly tycoons is very small. Judging by the C+ on CinemaScore and the 47% “definite recommend” rating on PostTrak, even fewer appreciated Iñárritu’s willingness to stew in the potential dystopian future our climate crisis could bring with no possible respite.

In terms of Cruise’s bankability, it’s way too early to say whether there’s any long-term damage. His next big project will take him right back to the world of legacy sequels with a follow-up to his 1990 NASCAR drama “Days of Thunder” alongside fellow top star Anne Hathaway. Just as the original “Days of Thunder” was made in an effort to replicate the success of “Top Gun” — to middling results — so too will this film look to capture some of the box office magic that “Top Gun: Maverick” conjured up in 2022.

“When you’re a superstar performer like Cruise, you have the leeway to take on roles that are very different from what you’re known for and show a different side of your talent. You’ve seen him now and then take on these roles that are outside of his lane and I think he will keep doing that,” said Patriach Organization chairman Eric Schiffer.

But when presented with Digger Rockwell, most moviegoers decided that if they wanted to watch billionaires lord over the world, they could turn on the news.