DIGGER Brings Out Hollywood's Billion Dollar Oarfish, Tom Cruise?

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

DIGGER is already being dubbed “flop of the year” by mean-girl online sites like Vulture, but we have a different angle on this big fish-starrer-that-wasn’t so far. Southern California has been casting its own disaster omens: specifically that mysterious ribbon-bodied eel-like indication from Japanese legend of an impending earthquake. A total of three surfaced in La Jolla, Huntington Beach and Encinitas during the past couple years, after only 19 in Cali since 1901. 

Hollywood, however, has its own billion-dollar specimen. Digger brought him out: Tom Cruise.

Ahead of Digger’s release Oct. 2, Cruise was everywhere, surfacing above water: beside Taylor Swift at a Chiefs game on the NFL TV screen, fronting GQ, on just about every premiere carpet. He showed up in surprise fan shots in Los Angeles, boogied to mariachi music in Mexico City and cluster-bombed late-night shows, while denying that Digger was actually a musical. Fun stuff, but so much out-of-character exposure for this A-Lister.

DIGGER: It’s a either weird specimen or a classic fish tale?

Consider TC on the Kelce bros’ podcast, admitting “I don’t read the scripts. I have them read it to me.” A rare confession that confirms what everybody in the flyovers thinks of Hollywood anyway, we’re illiterate? Lol, meanwhile, there was plenty of Cruise to go around, behind popcorn counters, somehow drafting himself into Concession Worker.

Then Digger bobs to the surface with a tepid $8 million domestic opening, $20 million worldwide, against a production budget that Variety and other outlets report over the listed $125 million at $160–180 million. Plus being on the hook for another other huge marketing bite, maybe $100 million.

Another strange omen is that his standalone movie arrived in the net of Warner Bros.’ final release weekend. Meaning before Paramount transaction’s expected Oct. 6 close slash morph into Skydance. Studio MegaBoss David Ellison has decided to stamp the mash-up entity, Paramount-WarnerBros, after his pet-project name Skydance.

Cruise’s climate-disaster dark comedy now bids an expensive farewell to the Old Hollywood Studio remnants.  No earthquake is required: but Hollywood’s billion-dollar oarfish had overexposed his movie star face, and the tremor was felt by all at the ticket counter.

So where did the money go when Digger dug its hole in the sand? Elsewhere.

Ticket buyers skewed female, sources say, not toward Tom Cruise Leading Man, but toward films with more identifiable emotional pegs. 

Or more to the point, with an online massive tsunami of fans for Amazon MGM’s Verity, the Colleen Hoover best-selling book turned movie, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. Verity slammed to shore first with $32.6 million domestically and about $62.6 million worldwide on a reported relatively tiny $40 million budget, almost making back it’s nut, so to speak. ;)

And yes, women accounted for approximately 78 percent of its opening audience.

Then you had Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s reboot, splashing up second with $12.5 million in its third weekend, following an opening audience that was 66 percent male. Obviously not the guys who went to see Digger, or would ever, most likely.

While Digger relentless promos led Tom Cruise everywhere, in his key-light Auteur film turn? TC finished fifth. Oarfish sighting mode had filled the publicity porthole, yet failed to land enough seats. All his leading-role films have collectively grossed approximately $12.7 billion—not the highest male total, but hardly small fry. So no crocodile tears, but?

You’d think his fans would go just to see the man himself, his departure from Action. He is still one of the most recognized actors in the world… oh, yeah, but not in Digger.

We’re probably carrying this rare deep-sea fish folkloric metaphor too far, but Hollywood’s expensive “art film” starring the MI franchise fronter maybe arrived with too much on the dock, bearing a goofy red herring play within a screenplay and a loaded climate agenda. 

So the Colleen Hoover fan girls and boys caught the bigger fish.

Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson hauled in roughly four times the amount Tom Cruise, Hollywood’s billion-dollar oarfish, netted for Digger despite stumping for the film harder than a whale rider. 

Three quarters female, Verity audiences opened their purses wide.

Interviews, fan encounters, dancing, premiere carpets: plenty of bait, mostly sardines. Verity won the weekend, the headlines, the fans; Digger pulled a bait with a Tom Cruise movie, but a switch with ‘not that kind' of Tom Cruise movie. The hours of prosthetics to age its leading man looked too much like an Oscar bid for some fans, and made him so unrecognizable to others that it muted his star-draw in ticket sales.

Don’t take this hook, line and sinker. Tom Cruise remains a maverick of movie-making, and Digger could still land an Oscar nomination or two, perhaps below the line if its leading man misses the boat. Above the line, on the marquee, Cruise remains a prize catch: Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel credited with helping rescue theatrical moviegoing in 2022, hauled in roughly $1.5 billion worldwide.

This auteur outing took our First Billion Dollar Movie Star, as Tom Cruise is known in Hollywood, beyond his familiar action waters, out to sea, adrift.

Whether his next Action Man adventure returns him to profitability is another fish tale waiting for its opening weekend… but will most productions have left Hollywood, set sail for cheaper crews in London, Budapest or Toronto by that time?

# # #