A new teaser trailer has arrived for Digger, the upcoming dark comedy from Alejandro G. Iñárritu starring Tom Cruise.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a flamboyant and wildly powerful oil tycoon who triggers a global catastrophe and then becomes determined to prove that he is humanity’s unlikely saviour. That premise alone gives the film a very different flavour from Cruise’s recent action-franchise work. This is not Ethan Hunt sprinting across rooftops to save the world with precision and jaw tension. This looks more like a meltdown with money, ego, oil and apocalypse all thrown into the same very expensive blender.
The teaser leans into Cruise’s transformation. Current coverage describes Digger as a satirical black comedy and a “comedy of catastrophic proportions,” with Cruise taking on an exaggerated, physically eccentric role that feels far removed from his usual polished action-hero image. The footage reportedly combines career-retrospective energy with a first proper look at Digger Rockwell himself, giving the campaign a strange mix of Hollywood tribute and full-blown chaos.
That shift is part of what makes Digger so intriguing. Iñárritu is best known for intense, formally ambitious films like Birdman, The Revenant and Bardo, but here he appears to be moving into something broader, sharper and more satirical. The idea of pairing his taste for existential pressure with Cruise’s maximum-commitment screen presence could produce something genuinely unhinged — in a good way, hopefully, not in a “what the hell did we just watch” way. Though with Iñárritu, maybe both.
The ensemble cast also gives the film serious weight. Alongside Cruise, Digger features John Goodman, Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Emma D’Arcy, Sophie Wilde and Michael Stuhlbarg. That is a very strong lineup for a story about power, catastrophe and public performance, especially if the film really does lean into the absurdity of one man trying to rebrand himself as the saviour of a disaster he helped unleash.
For fans of ambitious dark comedies, Digger looks like one of the strangest major releases on the 2026 calendar. It has the scale of a studio event movie, the prestige of an Iñárritu project and the curiosity factor of Tom Cruise doing something much weirder than jumping out of aircraft for our collective entertainment.
Digger opens in U.S. theaters on October 2, 2026.
Video source: ONE Media
