Tom Cruise’s Digger - a disaster flop or a bold film of our time?

Header image: DIGGER © Legendary Pictures

As Digger has hit cinemas this month, we’re reflecting on why its box office stats and mixed critical reviews are only part of the story, and what Tom Cruise’s new film might tell us about Hollywood’s appetite for storytelling that reflects our rapidly changing world.

While Digger has been met with a disappointing box office performance and mixed reviews from critics since its’ release earlier this month, the film has also attracted remarkably passionate champions from across Hollywood, including Anne Hathaway, Jane Fonda, Guillermo del Toro, Mandy Patinkin and Glen Powell, all taking to social media to defend the movie. Early audience reactions also lean towards a more positive reception than initial reviews might suggest.  

More broadly, we see Digger as another encouraging signal of a growing shift in our industry, with more and more high-profile talent and major studios choosing to back stories about climate, the extraordinary times we are living through, and our collective future.  

Is Digger a good climate story?

Digger is unconventional by Hollywood blockbuster standards. With a reported budget of $125 million, Tom Cruise leading a stellar cast, and a big theatrical release, Digger has been marketed like a traditional blockbuster. Yet Alejandro González Iñárritu’s artistic style is perhaps more in line with an art house film - a mismatch that may have misled critics’ perception on what box office success and the tone for a film like this would look like. Nor are initial reviews and box office stats the only measure of impact. Take Adam McKay’s 2021 climate satire Don’t Look Up, which, despite a mixed critical reception, became one of Netflix’s most popular films of all time. 

While Digger’s satirical tone, weird humour and over-the-top intense pace may not be everyone’s cup of tea, we welcomed its clear message that accountability for the climate crisis lies with the oil industry and political leaders. Some of the film's most powerful moments come through its dialogue, which directly confronts that Big Oil knowingly kept us locked into their destructive system. One line in particular deserves to be repeated again and again - 

“For decades you knew that gas was inhaled by sleeping children, and you sang lullabies to help them continue to sleep.”

Delivered by some of Hollywood’s biggest talents, these words give voice to an anger that is both justified and widely felt - and such conversations deserve to take place on the biggest cinematic stages. Importantly, they also move us away from individual responsibility and towards the systems and industries that have brought us to this point. 

However, provoking anger without offering a sense of agency or possibility of justice is a risk. For us, Digger’s greatest challenge was its bleakness and hopelessness. Its sense of despair, coupled with the story device of a play within a film, created a sense of emotional detachment.

That doesn't mean climate films need to be overly optimistic or offer easy solutions. There should be room for anger, absurdity and despair, just as there should be room for joy, humour and possibility. Climate stories should challenge, provoke, entertain and unsettle us in equal measure. What matters is creating an emotional connection with audiences and recognising the power of cinema, not only to expose the world as it is, but to help us imagine what it could become.

A growing creative movement

Digger joins a growing wave of film and TV releases that speak to the boiling frustration and anger at the systemic failure for justice. From Furious giving expression to the Me Too movement’s feeling that justice has been inadequate, to Korea’s The Glory, to East of Eden. Meanwhile, other recent Hollywood-backed projects similarly point to the increasing appetite and breadth of stories engaging with our changing world - from Ryan Gosling calling to drop dystopian narratives in favour of hopeful visions for his children as he promoted Project Hail Mary, to Hoppers exploring our relationship with nature through animation, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s How to Live on Earth. Or, on the smaller screen, take BBC drama The Rapture, starring Queen Charlotte star India Amarteifio, which remains one of the most watched BBC dramas of 2026. Across genres and formats, these recent releases show that stories speaking to the moment we’re in are increasingly finding a place in mainstream film and TV - and that more and more creatives are wanting to tell them.

And it’s not just creatives that are turning to these stories. There is also evidence that audiences want to see more of them. Netflix reports that over 80% of its members choose to watch at least one story that “helps them understand climate issues or highlights hopeful sustainability solutions”, and, research by Rare found that around 70% of Americans want Hollywood to include more climate-friendly actions on screen. 

What’s next for climate stories, then?

No single film will solve the climate crisis, and there is no one right way to tell a story in response to our rapidly changing world. What matters is the ‘Big Story’ of our time that all our stories collectively amount to, told through diverse voices, genres and perspectives. It is extraordinarily difficult to make and distribute a film as our industry grapples with a downturn in budgets and commissioning. But  if we respond to one film’s commercial stats in isolation by becoming more averse to taking creative risks or tackling climate themes, we are missing the bigger picture: the growing appetite of talent, filmmakers and audiences to creatively engage with these issues as well as the creative possibilities that climate storytelling holds as a lens to make sense of our world. Or, as Ben Affleck put it, in response to Digger, if we punish films that take risks, we will create a future of “shitty homogenized” movies.

Fundamentally, we should embrace Digger as a bold, creative take on climate. We need ambitious stories that take a big swing at exploring the extraordinary times we are living through, and it’s exciting to see that Hollywood talent is increasingly throwing their weight behind stories that speak to that.

The lively discussion about the film illustrates that Digger - whether it is the perfect climate story or not - is, among many other films, books, TV shows and plays, part of an evolving cultural conversation in which climate stories are increasingly moving into our zeitgeist. And we need to continue to build on that momentum, by giving more creatives the opportunity to explore these themes, and support our industry in backing them. That’s the work we do at Climate Spring, together with our global creative community and industry partners.