Digger box office tracking: Tom Cruise's $130M swing is headed for a $20M opening weekend

The first hard number is in for Digger, and it's the kind of number that makes studio accountants develop eye twitches. Per Puck's Matthew Belloni, the Tom Cruise–Alejandro G. Iñárritu dark comedy debuted on NRG tracking at a $20 million opening weekend, against an official budget of $130 million — a figure Warner Bros. insists on while Belloni and Page Six put the real cost north of $180 million.

What, exactly, did they build for that money

Digger, opening October 2, is the least Tom Cruise–shaped Tom Cruise movie in decades: no motorcycle, no HALO jump, no franchise. The 64-year-old plays billionaire Digger Rockwell, buried under heavy old-age prosthetics, who unleashes a global catastrophe and then tours the wreckage insisting he's the only one who can save civilization from it. Subtle, this is not. Around him: Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jesse Plemons — an ensemble assembled like an awards ballot.

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Iñárritu, making his first film since Bardo, explained the casting with characteristic modesty:

"To me, that's like asking somebody why you drink water when you are thirsty."

The math, which is the whole story

• $20 million projected — with Box Office Pro's range topping out around $30 million. Either way, no rescue for Warner Bros., which hasn't cracked a $40 million opening all year; Practical Magic 2 was supposed to and stalled at $30 million.
• The comp everyone's clinging to: One Battle After Another opened to a soft $22 million, then rode reviews to real box office and an Oscars sweep. That's the entire bull case for Digger, verbatim.
• The marketing problem: the trailers have divided audiences, and plenty of ticket-buyers still can't say what the movie actually is beyond Cruise in latex. Are you even supposed to root for the guy?

This was never engineered to win a weekend; it's engineered to win February. Which means the tracking number matters less than the one that arrives next: the reviews.

The superfans, meanwhile, have already chosen faith over data — as one Cruise devotee put it while sweating out the tracking report:

"I am ride or die for Cruise."

Tickets go on sale this week, with first social reactions expected immediately after — and full reviews holding until well into next week.

Previously we wrote: Paramount must release 30 films a year or sell Miramax, the label behind its biggest hit of the year