What Is ‘Digger’ About? Tom Cruise’s New Movie, Cast and Release Date

• Digger, Tom Cruise‘s new movie, opens in U.S. theaters and IMAX on Friday, Oct. 2.
• Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a drilling tycoon whose company sets off a global disaster. Warner Bros. sells it as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.”
• It is directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the Oscar winner behind Birdman and The Revenant, and co-stars Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons.

Tom Cruise is back in theaters this week, and not as Ethan Hunt. Digger, an original film from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, opens across North America on Friday, Oct. 2, and began its international rollout on Sept. 30.

Warner Bros. bills it as a comedy, and Cruise plays a man who causes a global catastrophe and then insists he is the one to fix it.

What is Digger about?

Warner Bros.’ official synopsis is one sentence: “The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.”

The final trailer fills in the rest. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, whose company runs an offshore drilling rig. The rig explodes, the explosion triggers a tsunami, and the president is told casualties could reach “the hundreds of thousands.”

Rockwell’s pitch is that he can fix it. “Digger here got us into this mess, and Digger’s gonna dig us out!” goes one line in the trailer, which is set to the Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House.” One title card sums up the joke: “With great power comes great deniability.”

Who is in the Digger cast?

• Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell
• Riz Ahmed, an Oscar winner
• John Goodman
• Sandra Hüller, an Oscar nominee
• Michael Stuhlbarg
• Jesse Plemons, an Oscar nominee

Warner Bros. has named only Cruise’s character so far. Behind the camera, Iñárritu reunites with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot Birdman and The Revenant. The prosthetic makeup is by Oscar winner Kazu Hiro, and the score is by Cosmo Sheldrake. Cruise is also a producer.

Is Digger a comedy?

Yes. The studio’s own tagline calls it “a comedy of catastrophic proportions,” and Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014), which won best picture, was a dark comedy too.

Cruise’s best-known comic role is Les Grossman, the foul-mouthed studio boss he played in Tropic Thunder (2008) under a bald cap and fat suit, a part that earned him a Golden Globe nomination.

Warner leaned on that history in June, with a “retrospective” trailer that cuts through decades of Cruise’s films, Grossman included, before landing on Digger.

When does Digger come out?

Digger opens in theaters and IMAX across North America on Friday, Oct. 2, 2026. International releases started on Sept. 30. It is a theatrical release; no streaming date has been announced.

What does “shot in VistaVision” mean?

The line “shot on VistaVision” at the end of the trailer refers to a film format from the 1950s. Standard 35mm film runs vertically through the camera; VistaVision runs it sideways, so each frame uses about twice as much negative. The result is a sharper, more detailed image, especially on big screens like IMAX.

The format was mostly abandoned in the 1960s and has come back in recent years with directors who shoot on film. Digger was shot entirely in it, with Lubezki behind the camera.

More on this fall’s movies: the new Netflix movies in October, Jon Watts’ Star Wars trilogy and the cast of The Love Hypothesis. Everything on Cruise is on his page, and more in Movies & TV.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: Warner Bros. Pictures (official Digger site, synopsis, cast and credits); official trailers released by Warner Bros. on June 23, July 13 and Sept. 9, 2026. Photos: frames from the official Digger trailers, Warner Bros.