NEW YORK — On the cusp of its merger with Paramount, Warner Bros. watched one of the biggest gambles of its final year as a standalone studio collapse at the box office, as “Digger” opened to one of the worst debuts of Tom Cruise’s career.
The Alejandro G. Iñárritu satire, among the most expensive original films of the year, grossed an estimated 8 million dollars in North America. Number one instead went to Amazon MGM’s “Verity,” the latest adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel, which debuted with 32.6 million dollars and extended the remarkable commercial streak of Hoover’s books on screen.
“Verity,” directed by Michael Showalter, stars Dakota Johnson as a writer hired to ghostwrite a book series by an incapacitated author, played by Anne Hathaway. Its opening confirmed that the Hoover audience, built on bestselling novels and social media word of mouth, now turns out for adaptations with the reliability studios usually associate with franchise sequels.
“Digger” had every advantage except the reviews. Cruise is ordinarily a formidable draw overseas, but international sales were also weak, at about 12 million dollars from 74 markets. After notices so poor that Warner Bros. resorted to “decide for yourself” advertising, estimates were revised down through the week. The production cost at least 125 million dollars, with reports putting it closer to 150 million, and marketing estimated at another 100 million.
The film had been positioned as an awards-season heavyweight, dated almost exactly where Warner Bros. placed “One Battle After Another” a year earlier, a similarly ambitious, politically charged production that went on to gross more than 213 million dollars worldwide and win best picture at the Academy Awards. “Digger” was meant to prove the strategy could repeat. Instead it became a case study in its risks.
Exhibitors’ numbers tell the colder version: a fifth-place debut from more than 3,300 screens, with IMAX accounting for an outsized share of the little money there was. Critics were unkind and opening audiences, graded in the C range, were not much warmer, which usually means the second weekend falls off a cliff.
It is probably unfair to read the result purely as a verdict on Cruise’s drawing power. His recent decade has been built on stunt-driven franchises, while “Digger” belongs to the auteur character-study tradition of his earlier career, the kind of film that is platformed slowly rather than opened wide. Warner Bros. chose the wide release, claiming one of the largest shares of showtimes in the country, and the market answered all at once.
The flop arrives at a moment of transformation for Hollywood, as Warner Bros. folds into a merged company and the executives who championed its audacious auteur slate depart. Their strategy produced an extraordinary run of hits last year and expensive misses alongside it. “Digger” may be remembered as the last big swing of that era, taken just as the era ended.
Part of the problem was built into the pitch. Attempts to sell the film on Cruise as a brand ran into the fact that the star spends the picture under old-age makeup, in an auteur-driven character role closer to his work in “Magnolia” or “Eyes Wide Shut” than to the stunt spectacles that made him the last reliable opener of the franchise era. Those earlier films were platformed gradually and found their audiences over months. Given a wide release and a franchise-sized marketing spend, “Digger” had to be an event on its first weekend. It was not, and the industry will spend the autumn deciding what that means for the next expensive original film a studio is asked to greenlight.
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