Warner Bros. released the full official trailer for Digger on Monday, July 13, and it offers the clearest look yet at what may be the most unrecognizable performance of Tom Cruise’s career. Under heavy prosthetics, a fake pot belly, thinning white hair styled into an unconvincing combover, and a thick Southern drawl, Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, an oil baron accused of triggering a global catastrophe, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
A Transformation Decades in the Making
The physical transformation has become the film’s central talking point since Cruise first debuted footage at CinemaCon in April. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu said the shift from movie star to disheveled tycoon took real convincing on Cruise’s part, telling press that preparing for the role effectively pulled from everything the actor had learned across his career, according to Variety. Cruise himself described the part as unlike anything he’d tackled before, saying neither he nor Iñárritu had faced a challenge quite like it.
What the Story Actually Follows
Marketed as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions,” Digger follows Rockwell after his energy company sets off an ecological disaster tied to a rapidly melting Greenland iceberg — one severe enough to risk sparking a nuclear conflict. An ailing U.S. president, played by John Goodman, orders Rockwell to fix the crisis he caused, sending him on a frantic mission to prove he can still save the world he put at risk, per FirstShowing.net.
Two Hollywood Heavyweights, One Long-Delayed Collaboration
Digger marks the first pairing between Cruise and two-time Oscar winner Iñárritu, and by the director’s own account, the idea had been sitting with him since he finished The Revenant roughly a decade ago. Iñárritu developed the screenplay alongside Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., and Nicolás Giacobone. The movie was filmed on 35mm in the VistaVision format, with cinematography handled by Emmanuel Lubezki, who also served as the director of photography.The Revenant, according to Deadline. Production ran roughly six months in the United Kingdom across late 2024 and into 2025, on a reported $125 million budget, as part of Warner Bros.’ broader push toward bigger, auteur-driven films following the success of Sinners in 2025.
An Ensemble Built to Match Him
Cruise leads an ensemble cast that includes Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, Michael Stuhlbarg, Burn Gorman, and Robert John Burke, alongside Goodman, according to Wikipedia. The lineup drew notice from critics tracking the film’s early buildup, with GoldDerby describing the CinemaCon footage as landing somewhere between Dr. Strangelove and Citizen Kane in tone.
A Rare Swing for Cruise
The film represents something of a departure point in Cruise’s career. It’s his first film for Warner Bros. Following 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow, this marks Tom Cruise’s first non-franchise film role since 2017, when he starred in both American Made and The Mummy. In between, his output has been dominated by Mission: Impossible sequels and Top Gun: Maverick. Some early reactions to the trailer’s rollout have noted the marketing itself leans heavily on Cruise’s star power and career highlight reel rather than plot specifics, a choice one reviewer at Kotaku called an unusually indirect way to sell a movie, even for one built around a movie star as recognizable as Cruise.
