Tom Cruise Has Made Nothing but Mission: Impossible and Top Gun for Nine Years. Digger Opens Friday, and the First Critics Cannot Agree on It.

Tom Cruise's last movie that was not a sequel was American Made, which opened in September 2017. In the nine years since, he has starred in exactly four films: three Mission: Impossible installments and Top Gun: Maverick. That run made him the last movie star most people would pay to watch hang off something. It also made him extremely predictable.

On Friday, October 2, that streak ends with Digger, a satirical black comedy from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, his first English-language film since The Revenant in 2015. Warner Bros. held it out of the entire fall festival circuit, a choice we noted in our fall movie preview, and bet on surprise instead. The world premiere came in London on September 22, ten days before release. The surprise, so far, is how differently people are reacting to it.

The pitch: the most powerful man in the world breaks it

Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an aging oil tycoon with grey hair, a Southern drawl, and a lot of prosthetic help. In the trailers, drilling by his company in Greenland sets off a chain reaction that threatens the planet, and the man who caused it decides he is also the man to save it. The official logline: "The most powerful man in the world races to prove he is humanity's savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything." The tagline is shorter: "A man. A plan. A meltdown."

The ensemble is stacked. Riz Ahmed plays Ganesh, a scientist. John Goodman plays the President of the United States, with Michael Stuhlbarg as his Vice President. Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), Jesse Plemons, Emma D'Arcy, and Sophie Wilde fill out the cast. It is rated R and runs 129 minutes.

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The team: most of Birdman is back

Iñárritu wrote the script with Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris, two of his Oscar-winning co-writers on Birdman, plus the Mexican playwright Sabina Berman. Emmanuel Lubezki shot it, reuniting with the director after the two films that gave Lubezki the second and third of his three straight cinematography Oscars (the first was Gravity). Stephen Mirrione, who cut Birdman and The Revenant, edited it alongside Conor O'Neill. The score is the first feature from the English musician Cosmo Sheldrake.

The format is part of the pitch. Cruise, Iñárritu, and Lubezki tested VistaVision against 65mm before choosing to shoot on 35mm VistaVision film at Pinewood Studios between November 2024 and spring 2025. Warner Bros. is releasing it in IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and other premium formats, plus select VistaVision screenings.

There is a personal thread, too. When Cruise finally received his Oscar, an honorary one at the Governors Awards last November, the person who handed it to him was Iñárritu. Cruise has been nominated four times (three for acting, for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia, and once as a producer of Top Gun: Maverick) and never won in competition. Iñárritu has four competitive Oscars of his own, including back-to-back Best Director wins. In October 2025 he promised Cruise would "surprise the world."

The reactions: from favorite film of the year to a mess

The first social reactions landed after the London premiere, and they do not agree on much:

• Anne Thompson, IndieWire: "a brave and gorgeous art film that will not score with mainstream audiences but will play best for the Academy."
• Jake Hamilton, Jake's Takes: "my favorite film of '26," and "a bit Kubrick, a bit Black Mirror."
• Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture: "a hollow misfire."
• Joey Magidson, Awards Radar: "a mess."
• Hoai-Tran Bui, Inverse: very mixed, with things to like and things that were "absolutely insufferable."

Even a few of the mixed takes single out Cruise for praise and aim their complaints at the film around him. The obvious comparison is Les Grossman, the foul-mouthed studio boss Cruise played under a bald cap and a fat suit in Tropic Thunder (2008), which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. This time he is the lead for more than two hours, not a scene-stealer.

The box office: a $125 million swing against a $40 million thriller

Digger carries a reported budget of $125 million, which is blockbuster money for an R-rated satire about an ecological disaster. Early tracking had it opening around $20 million. Since the reactions, some presale watchers have guessed lower.

It also has real competition. Amazon MGM opens Verity the same day, Michael Showalter's adaptation of the Colleen Hoover thriller, with Dakota Johnson as a struggling writer hired to finish the bestselling series of an incapacitated novelist (Anne Hathaway), and Josh Hartnett as the novelist's husband. It is R-rated, 117 minutes, and cost a reported $40 million. The last big Hoover adaptation, It Ends with Us, opened to $50 million in August 2024. Several forecasters have Verity opening bigger than Digger.

If that happens, it would be the second straight Cruise movie to open below number one. The Final Reckoning, the most recent Mission: Impossible, debuted in second place behind Lilo & Stitch over Memorial Day weekend in 2025. For a studio pitching Digger as an awards contender, though, opening weekend was never the whole plan.

Should you go?

Go if you loved the nervy energy of Birdman, if you have wanted to see Cruise act rather than sprint for a decade, or if you just want to see what Lubezki does with VistaVision on an IMAX screen. That last reason alone argues for the biggest screen near you, not a stream in three months.

Skip it, or at least wait for Tuesday's reviews, if you want Cruise the action hero. He is not here. For that, revisit our Mission: Impossible movies ranked, where Fallout still sets the bar. And if you want a packed Friday-night crowd gasping at the same twist, Verity is the safer date night.

Either way, this is the rare Cruise movie that will produce genuine arguments rather than a consensus. See it, then put it head to head with the rest of his filmography on Shortlist. Nobody will rank it in the middle.

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