Digger could lose $150 million after Tom Cruise film bombs at the box office | Tom Cruise

Digger flopped in its opening weekend with a worldwide box office of $20 million, giving Tom Cruise one of the worst debuts of his career and serving as a bitter final note for Warner Bros. as a standalone studio.

Alejandro G Iñárritu’s critically panned satire grossed a paltry $8 million at the North American box office. Cruises generally attract big numbers overseas, but international sales – $12 million in 74 markets – have also been weak.

It’s a rocky start for a film that cost at least $125 million to make. Reports put the production budget at $150 million, while marketing expenses are estimated at another $100 million. After reviews so bad that Warner Bros. opted to run “decide for yourself” ads, estimates for Digger have been revised downward over the past week.

The No. 1 in North American theaters instead went to Amazon MGM’s Verity, which opened with $32.6 million, extending Colleen Hoover’s streak of box office adaptations. The Michael Showalter-directed film stars Dakota Johnson as a writer hired to write a series of books by an incapacitated author, played by Anne Hathaway.

Digger had been positioned as a potential awards season juggernaut, dating almost exactly the same as Warner Bros’ One Battle After Another last year. Tom Cruise’s film is an equally politically charged film that gave a big budget to a renowned filmmaker working from an original story – but One Battle After Another grossed $213.2 million worldwide and, more importantly, won Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

The disappointing opening comes as Paramount Skydance finalizes its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery following U.S. District Court approval for the $110 billion deal received last Wednesday. Paramount announced it would close the merger on Tuesday and that massive layoffs were expected to follow.

In a boom year for Hollywood, Warner Bros. failed to land a $100 million film in the United States, although its December release, Dune: Part III, will easily surpass that figure.

“Digger collapsed this weekend and the new leadership at Paramount and Warner Bros., David Ellison, Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, will soon decide what kind of movies they want from WB,” wrote David A Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office figures. “Paramount has no recent history of making major arthouse films like this – this strategy seems outdated.”

Critics mostly criticized Digger as a tense farce about climate change, although Cruise’s over-the-top performance was more warmly received. Audiences agreed, giving it a “C+” CinemaScore.

Cruise spent most of the last decade starring in the films Mission: Impossible and Top Gun: Maverick, franchises that allowed him to remain a top action hero well into his sixties. The 64-year-old’s last big box office disappointment was the 2017 remake of The Mummy, which grossed $409.2 million worldwide on a budget of $195 million.

Last weekend’s top film, Avengers Endgame: Encore, slipped to seventh place with $4.4 million domestically and $14.4 million overseas. But the second week of Marvel’s re-release saw Endgame leapfrog Avatar to reclaim the title of highest-grossing film of all time, excluding inflation. The two films have swapped places in recent years with re-releases: Endgame now totals $2.9255 billion, while Avatar stands at $2.9237 billion.