Entertainment
Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ Flops, Could Lose Warner Bros. $150 Million
On Monday, Tom Cruise gamely signed autographs and posed for pictures outside The Directors Village for the Los Angeles premiere of “Digger,” flashing the confident smile that had made him a screen legend.
Yet, long before Cruise hit the red carpet alongside Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, who he praised for greenlighting “Digger” without needing to turn a page of its script, it was clear that the movie was going to flop. It was too dark, too weird, too critically excoriated. Opening weekend projections kept getting revised downward no matter what Cruise did to hawk the satire — dancing through Jennifer Hudson’s “spirit tunnel,” explaining the finer points of VistaVision to the Kelce brothers, or talking about aging in a completely normal way with GQ.
But few could have anticipated just how badly the film would bomb. Well, “Digger” is DOA, having opened to a disastrous $8 million this weekend. It debuted far below the weekend’s other new release, “Verity,” an adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel that critics have lambasted en route to its $32.6 million opening, and was also outgrossed by holdovers like “Resident Evil” and “Primetime.” International audiences, which typically show up for Cruise flicks, also aren’t buying tickets. It grossed $12 million from 74 markets to bring the global haul to a pallid $20 million. The only hope here is that “Digger” can reemerge as an awards contender, an improbable outcome, but one that would provide greater cultural value.
As it stands “Digger,” which officially cost $125 million to produce (sources peg the true price tag at closer to $160 million), needs to make roughly $350 million theatrically to break even. Warner Bros., which backed the film with Legendary, has put the breakeven point at $300 million. That means “Digger” is staring at a loss of $150 million or more, according to two executives with knowledge of its finances. For context, theaters keep half of ticket sales and Warner Bros. spent tens of millions to market “Digger.”
The result is “Digger” will go down as one of the biggest, if not the biggest flops of Cruise’s career. He’s had a few — “The Mummy,” for instance, lost $95 million and killed Universal’s Dark Universe ambitions in their cradle. The most recent Cruise film to open softer than “Digger,” the 2007 political thriller “Lions for Lambs,” was another disappointment, though it only cost $35 million to make. The film itself is a historic bomb, keeping company with the likes of “John Carter,” “Cutthroat Island,” and “The Lone Ranger.”
As for De Luca and Abdy, they’re still on the Warners lot, but they won’t be for long. The studio’s new owner, David Ellison, let them know Friday after it had already been widely reported in the trades that they wouldn’t continue in their roles after Skydance assumes control and merges the company with Paramount. And the film’s massive losses will justify a pivot that felt inevitable as soon as word broke that Ellison was making a play for Warner Bros. — fewer “Diggers,” more “Days of Thunder 2’s.”
Sadly, the mogul may be right from a financial perspective. De Luca and Abdy were the most auteur-friendly of studio chiefs, giving Paul Thomas Anderson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ryan Coogler, and Alejandro González Iñárritu the kind of budgets they would have struggled to secure elsewhere.
Sometimes, their bets paid off. Few would question the wisdom of the “Sinners” deal they made with Coogler returning the film’s copyright, though they did initially. After all, “Sinners” was a huge hit. More recently, De Luca and Abdy’s ambitious gambits have failed to reap profits. Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” and Iñárritu’s “Digger” are among the decade’s biggest money losers, while Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was an Oscar-winning write-down. When “One Battle After Another” swept the Academy Awards, a Paramount executive reminded me of their different mandate. “We don’t lose $100 million to win Best Picture,” the exec scoffed.
That may be good news for Skydance’s shareholders, who are understandably worried about how Ellison is going to operate two entertainment giants while paying down $80 billion in debt, but it won’t be great for cinephiles. Love it or hate it, “Digger” is a bold swing. Iñárritu’s dark look at corporate greed and climate change arrives with lots of big ideas to unpack, and Cruise gives the kind of go-for-broke performance that he largely abandoned to play an action hero. It may be a while before moviegoers see him in this mode again.
As for Cruise, he may have praised De Luca and Abdy’s chutzpah, but he also is very familiar with Ellison, having made “Top Gun: Maverick” and several “Mission: Impossible” films with Skydance. He’s already given the merger his blessing, telling Pat McAfee that bringing together Warner Bros. and Paramount will lead to “abundance.”
“They’re going to deliver 30 movies. It’s a community to me. It’s not an industry. The people in these studios are not just people in the studios, they’re my family,” Cruise told McAfee. “I know we’re going to get those 30 movies. I want us all to come together as a community to help make those 30 movies. It’s not just going to be Paramount doing it. Everyone’s going to need all the help of every artist to be able to do it.”
According to a report in TheWrap, when Abdy and De Luca got the call from Ellison telling them that they were out of the family, they had a tart response.
“Good luck to you,” Abdy told Ellison with some bitterness. “I left you 39 movies.”
But is it a slate filled with more “Sinners” than “Diggers”?
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CAA has hired former NFL, Sony Music and Time Inc. executive Dasha Smith as Chief Operating Officer.
In her most recent post as EVP and Chief Administrative Officer at the NFL, Smith was a member of Commissioner Roger Goodell’s Executive Operating Committee. She helped shape the league’s enterprise strategy and oversaw a broad portfolio of business functions, including technology, AI and innovation, data and analytics, strategy and business intelligence, human resources, inclusion, social responsibility and philanthropy, and league office administration.
At Sony Music, Smith was EVP, Global Chief Human Resources Officer for Sony Music Entertainment, and Managing Director, Office of the Chairman, at GCM Grosvenor, a global alternative investment firm, where she led a number of corporate functions.
During her nearly 10-year stint at Time Inc., Smith led global employee relations and employment law functions. She also served as a senior attorney in the Time Warner publishing division’s business and legal affairs department, focusing on M&A.
Smith began her legal career at Latham & Watkins, Covington & Burling, and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
“Dasha is a remarkably talented, accomplished and energetic leader with a deep understanding of how global organizations operate at their very best,” CAA Co-Chairman and CEO Bryan Lourd said in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming her to our senior management team and benefiting from her significant experience helping to guide leading media and sports organizations.”
A board member at financial advisory firm CAPTRUST and investment management firm Cohen & Steers, Smith also serves as a trustee for nonprofit organizations focused on education and the arts.
“I have tremendous respect for the industry leadership position that CAA and its management team continue to build on every year,” she said in a statement. “Even greater is my appreciation for its widely admired, consistent mission to deliver the best possible service and resources to its clients. Joining a culture with that kind of clarity and purpose is an extraordinary opportunity.”
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Dasha Smith has joined CAA as Chief Operating Officer, the agency announced Monday.
Smith most recently served as Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer at the National Football League.
“Dasha is a remarkably talented, accomplished and energetic leader with a deep understanding of how global organizations operate at their very best,” CAA co-chairman and CEO Bryan Lourd shared in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming her to our senior management team and benefiting from her significant experience helping to guide leading media and sports organizations.”
“I have tremendous respect for the industry leadership position that CAA and its management team continue to build on every year,” Smith added. “Even greater is my appreciation for its widely admired, consistent mission to deliver the best possible service and resources to its clients. Joining a culture with that kind of clarity and purpose is an extraordinary opportunity.”
At the NFL, where she was a member of Commissioner Roger Goodell’s Executive Operating Committee, Smith helped shape the league’s enterprise strategy and oversaw a broad portfolio of business functions, including technology, AI and innovation, data and analytics, strategy and business intelligence, human resources, inclusion, social responsibility and philanthropy, and league office administration.
Previously, she was Executive Vice President, Global Chief Human Resources Officer for Sony Music Entertainment; and Managing Director, Office of the Chairman at GCM Grosvenor, a global alternative investment firm, where she led a number of corporate functions.
At WarnerMedia’s Time Inc. for nearly 10 years, she led global employee relations and employment law functions. She also served as a senior attorney in the Time, Inc. business and legal affairs department, focusing on M&A.
Smith began her legal career at Latham & Watkins, Covington & Burling, and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
A board member at financial advisory firm CAPTRUST and investment management firm Cohen & Steers, Smith also serves as a trustee for nonprofit organizations focused on education and the arts.
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Sebastian Stan is carefully talking about his mysterious role in The Batman: Part II.
“It’s one of the most challenging situations I’ve been involved in,” the Captain America: The Winter Soldier actor told the Happy Sad Confused podcast in an episode published Monday. “I feel like it’s hard to talk about it without it becoming some speculative thing from some corner. I think it’s a very ambitious thing, and I hope it lands right. I have a lot of faith in it, because I just do feel like [director Matt Reeves] is truly a genius of our time, and one of the very few people that I think is so unique and so specific. And he has been at this for three years. I mean, it’s not an accident. He knows what he’s doing. And so I’m just happy to be part of that vision.”
“I just think it’s going to be great,” he added. “This is definitely, for me, feeling like something very different than I’ve gotten to do. And that’s what I love, and I’m excited about.”
Stan has been rumored to play the iconic Gotham City district attorney Harvey Dent (also known as Two-Face) in the film, but that’s not confirmed.
The actor also discussed how he landed the role in the first place, saying he “poked the bear” by nudging DC Studios co-chief James Gunn, and didn’t expect to get the part given his longtime association with the MCU.
“The DC thing was honestly always sort of a kind of like a joke in my mind,” he said. “I was like, ‘there’s no way that I’m ever going to end up [on a DC Studios film]’ … [But] Matt had seen The Apprentice and really liked the film and my work in that. And then that inspired a conversation. Subsequently, around the same time, I was kind of poking the bear a bit over there with James Gunn, going, ‘I think we should figure something out.’”
The comments come as production on The Batman: Part II in London pauses temporarily while director Matt Reeves takes some time to deal with a personal family matter. “Matt has the full support of DC Studios and we look forward to continuing the journey soon,” a studio spokesperson said.
The Batman: Part II stars Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne/Batman. In addition to Stan, the production has also added fellow MCU veteran Scarlett Johansson in an undisclosed role. The film currently has a release date of Feb. 18, 2028.
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