Tom Cruise is in a new movie with a new look and disheveled haircut we haven’t seen since the days of Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder — called Digger, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant).
It’s a mystery of a film as of now, with not too many details made public. Still, Digger is billed as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions,” with a logline describing Cruise’s character as “the most powerful man in the world” who “embarks on a frantic mission to prove that he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything,” according to Variety.
The trailer above, scored to the underutilized Gorillaz track “O’Green World,” depicts Cruise’s character, Digger Rockwell, in a dark room with a shovel, until he finds himself standing triumphantly on a beach boardwalk, looking at the sunset. The song itself depicts an apocalyptic planet, which fits snugly within the film’s premise.
Digger also stars Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde, Riz Ahmed, and Emma D’Arcy, despite none of them appearing in the trailer or having their names included.
The film was shot over six months in the U.K. and marks Iñárritu’s first English-language feature since The Revenant. He also co-wrote Diggers in 2023 with Birdman collaborators Nicolas Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris, along with Macho and Gloria writer Sabina Berman. For Cruise, it’s his first Warner Bros. Discovery release since Edge of Tomorrow over a decade ago, following his January deal to develop and produce theatrical films.
It’s pretty interesting to see Cruise go in this direction after seemingly drawing his Mission: Impossible film franchise to a close with the most recent Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. Even before that, Cruise had been resting on the laurels of his franchises, even bringing Top Gun back to phenomenal effect. So seeing him go for this smaller-scale comedy where he isn’t a looker (his hair looks like it’s balding in the trailer) and seems like a kind of a nut job is interesting.. Is he having his One Battle After Another moment like Leonardo DiCaprio, or are we in for something a little more weird?
Digger, a joint effort from Warner Bros and Legendary Entertainment, will release Oct. 2, 2026.
