‘Digger’ Final Trailer Puts Tom Cruise’s Unrecognizable Transformation on Full Display

Alejandro G. Iñárritu has built a career out of ambitious, genre-defying projects, from the visceral survival drama of ‘The Revenant’ to the surreal introspection of ‘Birdman.’ His latest venture pairs him with one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars for a project unlike anything either man has attempted before.

That collaboration is ‘Digger,’ a satirical black comedy marking Iñárritu’s first English-language film since ‘The Revenant’ and Tom Cruise’s first project under his new deal with Warner Bros. Discovery. The film has been described as a comedy of catastrophic proportions, following billionaire energy tycoon Digger Rockwell as he scrambles to stop a disaster of his own making.

With the film’s October 2 release now just weeks away, Warner Bros. has released the final trailer, giving audiences their most complete look yet at Cruise’s dramatic physical transformation into the aging, potbellied oil magnate at the center of the story. The new footage leans hard into the film’s absurdist tone, showing Digger racing to position himself as humanity’s savior even as the disaster he unleashed threatens to spiral completely out of control.

The film centers on Digger Rockwell, a billionaire whose company may have set off an ecological disaster capable of sparking a nuclear war, forcing him into a frantic mission to prove he’s the one person capable of fixing it. Cruise plays the role with a thick Southern accent, thinning combed-over hair, and a noticeably different physical presence than audiences are used to seeing from the typically action-ready star.

Joining Cruise in the ensemble are Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde, and Emma D’Arcy, rounding out a cast built to match the scale of Iñárritu’s satirical ambitions. Goodman notably voices the U.S. president in the film’s marketing, delivering a memorable line about Digger being the one who caused the mess and the one who’ll dig everyone out of it.

Cruise has spoken about the unusually collaborative process behind bringing the film to life. He explained that Iñárritu spent several days simply reading him the script aloud, allowing him to fully absorb the director’s vision before figuring out how to contribute his own ideas, a process he said he’s used with select filmmakers throughout his career.

At a recent trailer launch event on the Warner Bros. lot, Cruise told The Hollywood Reporter that he’d never had a project challenge him in quite this way, adding that the same held true for Iñárritu. He’s also described ‘Digger’ multiple times as the culmination of his career, a notable departure after a decade spent almost entirely within franchise filmmaking.

Despite Warner Bros. officially citing a $125,000,000 production budget, reporting around the film’s true cost has remained murky. Some industry insiders have suggested the actual figure could be pushing closer to $200,000,000, though the studio has not confirmed any number beyond its original estimate.

Shot on VistaVision by acclaimed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, the film’s striking visual style has already drawn comparisons to filmmakers like Roy Andersson, while its apocalyptic satire and bumbling political figures have invited inevitable comparisons to ‘Dr. Strangelove.’

With ‘Digger’ skipping the traditional festival circuit entirely, unlike Paul Thomas Anderson’s awards-season darling ‘One Battle After Another’ from the previous year, the film’s marketing campaign has had to work harder to build buzz ahead of release. Whether this final trailer succeeds in generating that momentum remains to be seen, but with Cruise and Iñárritu both describing the project as a genuine creative risk, ‘Digger’ looks positioned to be one of October’s most talked-about releases.

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