Digger’s Trailer Unveils His Most Un-Tom Cruise Role Yet After Doing Death-Defying Roles

Tom Cruise did everything to grab our eyeballs, as hanging off airplanes, scaling skyscrapers, and drawing in depths of water are all synonymous with his name. But Digger’s trailer caught our attention for his almost unrecognizable role. 

According to Variety, Digger is described as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.” It is the first Warner Bros. film from Inarritu in the English language since The Revenant (2015). 

Digger was filmed in VistaVision, a high-definition analog process first introduced in the 1950s. Films like The Brutalist (2024) and One Battle After Another (2025) have been filmed with the same technique. 

Plot details of Digger (2026)

The story focuses on Digger Rockwell (played by Tom Cruise), an eccentric billionaire whose oil-related accident causes a massive ecological disaster. The fatal consequences could lead to $18 trillion of losses along with a gigantic nuclear waste crisis. 

He embarks on a mission to prove himself as humanity’s biggest savior. 

Watch the trailer here:

The trailer begins with Cruise’s voiceover in the clip, “Everything changes. One day you’re a cat or a king. Next day, you’re just ashes in the box.”

The trailer shows that Digger is concerned over his product being the source of disturbance for a glacier to melt, and cause calamitous ecological events, which could likely cause great harm to the billion-dollar platform that he owns. A comedic angle added to the trailer is Digger’s bigger concern: his ancient white cat, who has around two weeks and five minutes to live. 

One of the catchiest lines in the trailer is when Digger says, “When all else fails, you hit them with the truth. You know the hard truth. Just bang bang bang.” 

Director’s vision for the film

Inarritu explained that he had a subtle idea of what he had to do next, but had no script in hand. He knew how he wanted his character to be. He said, 

“I knew how he spoke, how he survived, how he seduced reality into agreeing with him. But it took me 10 years to do this film, because I wasn’t looking for a story. I was looking for the right way of saying it. And it’s absurd, it’s dangerous, but certainly comedic, because the source of great comedy is tragedy.” [Source]

He went on to explain how people kept asking about his choice of the actor and why Tom Cruise seemed the right one. He opened up that it was like having only water when you are thirsty; Cruise was like that for the said role. He was the only first choice of the chaotic character that the director had in mind for years.

It is Cruise’s first film with Inarritu, but the honorary Oscar recipient had been a longtime fan of The Revenant director since the days when his film Amores Perros (2000) was released. He couldn’t stop praising his “skilled eye” for staging, camera, design, movie colors, performances, and every minute detail that goes into the filmmaking process.

Cruise kept promoting the director in front of others, urging them to watch his films. Meanwhile, he kept waiting for the right time to collaborate with him and was utterly excited when he actually got one. He spent days with the Birdman director reading the script together. 

Cruise acknowledged his mastermind tactics behind the scenes, and the actor kept listening to him as he wanted to thoroughly understand what Inarritu had in mind. It was like stepping off the edge of a cliff with your eyes closed and saying, “I trust you,” because Cruise knew it was going to be “a hell of an experience.”

Now that the first trailer of the film has dropped, we expect more glimpses to come. It is possible that the first trailer just touched the tip of the iceberg and keeps the emotional and thematic depth intact for the remaining feature once it hits theaters. Knowing how Digger’s character would be, the film could be charming as well as manipulative, appearing to be a warning about how the most powerful and influential people could be dangerous, who sometimes force you to agree with them. 

How did Tom Cruise become unrecognizable in Digger’s trailer?

As we can see in the trailer, the 64-year-old actor has radically transformed himself into an aging oil tycoon with all gray hair and a pot belly for a frantic mission. He was unrecognizable in the first ten seconds. Still, on closer look, it was evident that it was the same extremely physically fit Ethan Hunt from Mission: Impossible that we had been watching on big screens for years. 

Cruise admitted himself that Digger is a challenging role that he has never taken before and is the accumulation of all the experiences that he has had, for example, Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025), and suchlike, during his 36-year career. 

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When is Digger (2026) releasing?

Warner Bros. has slated Digger for a theatrical release on October 2, 2026. 

Genre: Dark comedy, satire, drama

Cast: Tom Cruise, Sandra Huller, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed

Director: Alejandro G. Inarritu

Writers: Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone

Producers: Legendary Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures 

Release date: October 2, 2026

Movie runtime: – –