Tom Cruise (yes that’s him) is placing a risky bet on this $125m eco-satire

Alexander LarmanTue, July 14, 2026 at 12:15 PM UTC

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Tom Cruise is unrecognisable as the billionaire oil baron Digger Rockwell in the film’s new trailer

Under normal circumstances, a $125m (though recent reports have it at $200m) blockbuster from a double Oscar-winning director, starring the biggest movie star on the planet, would be the year’s most anticipated picture. Yet after months of speculation, the trailer for Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, starring Tom Cruise, has finally been released, and… well.

Not only is Cruise barely recognisable in the preview, sporting a considerable amount of prosthetics and thinning grey hair to play Digger Rockwell, a squillionaire oil baron whose reckless actions lead to ecological disaster, but the film’s tone is deeply unorthodox. It is seemingly pitched somewhere between the perky dystopian satire of Robert Pattinson’s Mickey 17and the anti-establishment nihilism of Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr Strangelove. With, it must be said, more than a dash of Netflix’s similarly doom-laden end-of-world comedy Don’t Look Up.

Digger, which is subtitled “a comedy of catastrophic proportions”,was never expected to be another Mission: Impossible. But what makes the trailer so utterly bizarre is that Iñárritu – who had back-to-back Oscar-winning hits with Birdman and The Revenant– seems to have embraced a frantic, haphazard kind of film-making full of self-consciously symmetrical filming by his regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. It looks like something that the absurdist Swedish director Roy Andersson might have produced if he’d been given a budget far beyond his wildest dreams.

An all-star cast – John Goodman (as the narcoleptic US President), Riz Ahmed, Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller – all appear to be giving hugely stylised and non-naturalistic performances, often caked in prosthetics. And while the enormous budget is up there on the screen in terms of scenes of ecological disaster, the tone of the preview is pitched somewhere between hysteria and artificial whimsy. There are scenes in which Digger talks proudly (if perhaps boastfully) about the size of his manhood; there are scenes in which he coos over his terminally ill cat.

John Goodman as the narcoleptic US President

Riz Ahmed (right) also joins the all-star cast

This is, to put it mildly, not Top Gun: Maverick. It’s not even Tropic Thunder, the last time that Cruise played so out-there a comic character, the profane studio executive Les Grossman, and did so complete with a bald cap, fat suit and enormous prosthetic hands. But that was a supporting performance in a mainstream studio comedy, deliberately unbilled to maintain the element of surprise. Everything in Digger is front and centre, and so there is every chance that the results, which will be revealed upon its release on October 2, are going to be very, very strange indeed.

Cruise, to his immense credit, has spent his entire career working with auteur directors he admires. Some of these collaborations have become legendary (Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson), whereas others have been less happy (John Woo, Brian de Palma). But his collaboration with Iñárritu has been on the cards since 2000, when the actor called the film-maker’s breakthrough picture, Amores Perros, “some of the most bold, fearless and imaginative cinema of a generation”.

Iñárritu’s sets are not necessarily the easiest places to work – the notoriously difficult production of The Revenantsaw its budget spiral from $60m to $135m because of the costs of making it – but he is widely acclaimed as one of the leading auteurs of our time, whose gritty and uncompromising films are often leavened with a bleak, dark humour.

Digger, however, is something wholly different. Seven years ago, the film-maker came to Cruise with the finished screenplay, which he co-wrote with Birdman screenwriters Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris Jr and the Mexican journalist Sabina Berman. Cruise had an unorthodox request: that the director read the script out loud. As he said at a recent Q&A event: “Alejandro took several days during which he was just reading the script to me and I’m listening to everything that’s in his mind, so that I can understand that, and then I know how to contribute to it and bring that collaboration together.”

Even for the director, this promised to be an unusually challenging project. It was filmed in conditions of utter secrecy at Pinewood Studios in Britain, under the working title Judy, and the only details that were leaked to the public domain during its six-month filming schedule were firstly its cast and the briefest of plot summaries – “The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s saviour before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything” – and secondly the information that Goodman was briefly hospitalised for a hip injury last March.

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Iñárritu has called Cruise’s transformation ‘astonishing’, while the actor has described the film as ‘totally original’

It has been filmed by the Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki on vintage VistaVision cameras, on the grounds that the picture deserves an epic scale. (The same cameras were used to make The Brutalist.) While it was suggested from early on that Cruise had undergone a considerable physical transformation to play the character, it has only recently been revealed that he worked with the prosthetic makeup designer Kazu Hiro – who transformed Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for Darkest Hour, and deservedly won an Oscar for doing so – to create Digger’s gone-to-seed appearance.

Cruise has of course transformed his all-American and enduringly youthful appearance in the past, sporting grey hair for his ruthless assassin in Collateral and long blond locks as the bloodsucking Lestat in Interview with the Vampire. But even more so than Grossman’s grotesque transformation, this is an exercise in making himself look both unrecognisable and near-unpalatable. How this will land with the Top Gun and Mission: Impossible fans who have been flocking to the multiplexes for years remains to be seen.

Certainly, Digger is a hugely expensive gamble. Don’t Look Up may or may not have been a box-office hit – as it was acquired by Netflix, it was never given much of a theatrical release – but few films that have dealt with ecological crisis have especially resonated with audiences, who may prefer escapism rather than being lectured. In either case, Digger is one of a stream of pictures from a Warner Bros regime that has produced considerable hits (Sinners, Weapons, One Battle After Another) and huge misses (Joker: Folie à Deux, Mickey 17 and The Bride!).

An awful lot is riding on Digger, not least because Cruise would very much like to win an Oscar. He was given an honorary award last November – presented by Iñárritu – and based on the trailer, Digger Rockwell is one of those transformational roles that the Academy loves to reward. Add this to a general sense that Cruise is well overdue an award, as much for his endless services to the film industry as he is for acting and producing. If Digger is any good, it looks likely that he is the current Best Actor frontrunner.

Cruise received an Honorary Academy Award at the 16th Governors Awards, in Hollywood last year - Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images

That “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, however. Judging by the trailer, this one could very much go either way. Cruise has never been the greatest physical comedian, and it is possible that his performance will lean heavily into grotesquerie without being either amusing or effective. On the other hand, Iñárritu has won five Oscars for a reason.

Whatever the case, director and star are both talking a good game. Iñárritu has called Cruise’s transformation “astonishing”, while the actor has described the film as “totally original”.

Undeniably, in an era of sequels, remakes and cash-ins, Digger is offering something wholly different. As Cruise recently said: “There’s nothing better than to physically and metaphorically stand on the edge of a cliff and go, ‘Let’s do this!’” Time will tell whether he plunges ignominiously or soars triumphantly.

Digger is released on October 2

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