Warner Bros. Is Reportedly Betting Big on Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ Following ‘One Battle After Another’ Comparisons as Budget is Revealed

Tom Cruise has spent two decades dominating the box office through franchise juggernauts like ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Mission: Impossible,’ rarely straying far from the kind of action spectacle audiences expect from him. That streak is about to break in a major way, as Cruise heads into theaters this fall in a project unlike anything he’s attempted in years.

The film is ‘Digger,’ directed by two-time Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, marking Cruise’s first film with Warner Bros. since signing a deal to develop and produce theatrical projects with the studio back in January 2024. It’s also his first starring role outside the ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Mission: Impossible’ franchises since 2017’s ‘American Made,’ a shift that alone has generated significant buzz ahead of the film’s October 2 release.

That buzz has only grown louder given the numbers attached to the project behind the scenes. Warner Bros. has officially reported the film’s budget at $125 million, a figure the studio is publicly standing behind even as some industry insiders suggest the true cost may have climbed significantly higher during production.

That official price tag places ‘Digger’ squarely in the same territory as ‘One Battle After Another,’ Paul Thomas Anderson’s costly 2025 release that reportedly lost Warner Bros. around $100 million despite widespread critical acclaim. Given that comparison, the studio appears to be betting that strong reviews, awards attention, and Cruise’s box office pull can help ‘Digger’ avoid a similar financial outcome.

‘Digger’ casts Cruise as a radically transformed Southern oil tycoon whose company triggers an ecological disaster, sending him on a frantic mission to reframe himself as humanity’s savior before the fallout spirals into nuclear catastrophe. The film leans heavily on prosthetics to reshape Cruise’s appearance, marking one of the more dramatic physical transformations of his career.

Iñárritu has described the project as an idea that stayed with him for a decade following ‘The Revenant,’ explaining in a video message that he knew exactly who the character was and how he spoke long before he ever found the right way to tell his story. Reflecting on what the role demanded of him, Cruise said he’s never encountered something quite this challenging in his career, and that the same held true for Iñárritu, according to Variety.

The film’s ensemble includes Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Emma D’Arcy, and John Goodman, who plays the president navigating the fallout of Cruise’s character’s disaster. Shot over six months in the UK with longtime Iñárritu collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki behind the camera, the production reflects the same level of technical ambition audiences have come to expect from the director’s previous work.

‘Digger’ also fits into a broader pattern at Warner Bros., which has spent 2026 backing a string of costly, director-driven projects, including Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride,’ Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights,’ and David Robert Mitchell’s ‘Flowervale Street.’ Of all these bets, the Cruise and Iñárritu collaboration may carry the highest stakes given its scale and the studio’s clear hope that it delivers both critical and commercial success.

With the film’s theatrical release just weeks away, all eyes will be on whether ‘Digger’ can defy the tough odds facing high-budget auteur filmmaking in today’s box office landscape.

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