Tom Cruise Plays an Oil Baron Who Cracked a Greenland Glacier Loose in Iñárritu's Digger, Out October 2

A satirical black comedy shot entirely in VistaVision, with a royal-family premiere and a cast stacked with recent Oscar winners and nominees

Warner Bros. and Legendary's Digger is one of the stranger swings of the fall season: Tom Cruise, playing about as far from a Mission: Impossible hero as he's gone in years, transformed into Digger Rockwell — a potbellied, white-haired, thick-Southern-drawl oil baron in a cowboy hat, the kind of character built for a satire rather than an action franchise. Rockwell's own drilling operation in Greenland cracks a glacier loose and sets off an unfolding environmental catastrophe, and the film follows his frantic effort to be seen as humanity's savior from the exact disaster he caused.

The film comes from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant, working from a screenplay he co-wrote with his regular collaborators Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman — the same team behind Birdman. Described by early coverage as a satirical black comedy, it was shot entirely in VistaVision, the wide-format process Paramount developed in the 1950s and revived in recent years for films chasing a specific large-format, high-resolution look.

Cruise isn't carrying this one alone: the supporting cast is genuinely stacked, with Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jesse Plemons — all either recent Oscar winners or nominees — alongside Sophie Wilde, Emma D'Arcy, Robert John Burke, and Burn Gorman. That's an unusually prestige-heavy ensemble for a film built around a comedic lead performance, and it signals a project Warner Bros. and Legendary are treating as a real awards-season swing, not just a star vehicle.

The film's London premiere leaned into that positioning, with Prince William and Kate Middleton attending — a level of royal-family visibility usually reserved for a handful of prestige releases each year, not every studio comedy. At $125 million, Digger's budget also puts it well above where most black comedies land, closer to the scale of a traditional awards-season tentpole than an indie satire.

Early reviews from the film's premiere circuit have already started to surface, with at least one outlet drawing comparisons to Kubrick's and Peter Sellers' satirical register — a genuinely high bar to invoke, and a sign the film is being read as a real formal swing rather than a straightforward comedy. Digger opens internationally starting September 30, with the wide U.S. release following on October 2.

What's not yet clear, this close to release, is how audiences will respond to Cruise stepping fully out of his usual register — the film is betting a $125 million budget and a starry ensemble on a lead performance that's deliberately unglamorous and, by design, a little grotesque. That's a real risk for a film built around one of the most recognizable movie stars alive, and it's the single biggest open question hanging over Digger's opening weekend.

Original coverage: Digger opens October 2, 2026