Warner Bros. has released the official trailer for Digger, and Tom Cruise is very clearly not playing the polished action hero this time.
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Digger stars Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate whose massive ego and catastrophic business decisions place him at the centre of an $18 trillion disaster. The trailer frames him as a man desperate to convince the world that he is not the villain of the crisis, but the only person powerful enough to save everyone from it. (people.com)
That is already a sharp premise, but the real shock is Cruise himself. The trailer shows him transformed with heavy prosthetics, playing older, heavier, louder and far stranger than his recent franchise roles. After years of watching him sprint, fly, climb and throw himself through practical action set pieces, Digger looks like a deliberately messy left turn into satire, vanity and moral panic.
Warner Bros. describes the film as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions,” which feels like exactly the right phrase. This is not simply a disaster movie, and it does not look like a standard prestige drama either. It appears to be a black comedy about power, self-delusion and the terrifying confidence of a man who may have broken the world while insisting he is the only one qualified to repair it.
The cast around Cruise is also seriously strong, with Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, Michael Stuhlbarg and John Goodman all joining Iñárritu’s strange new project. Entertainment Weekly reports that Plemons described the script as “one of the strangest, funniest, most tragic” he had read, even comparing its tone to a modern Dr. Strangelove. (ew.com)
For fans of dark comedy movies, Digger looks like one of 2026’s boldest studio curiosities: a major star in full transformation mode, an Oscar-winning director pushing into apocalyptic satire, and a character whose greatest superpower may be his absolute refusal to admit he caused the problem.
Digger opens in theaters on October 2, 2026.
