Cruise Wants the Oscar. Digger May Not Want Him Back.

Tom Cruise is doing the awards thing again, and the movie he brought is not a stunt reel. Variety’s Clayton Davis put the question on September 23: can the last movie star still chasing an acting Oscar get voters to look at the performance instead of the brand, when the movie itself has already split the room.

First reactions, also in Variety two days earlier, used the words baffling, unpleasant, and brave in the same pile. Someone in that piece said the divide was going to be wide. That is not a quote you put on a bus shelter.

We have been living in festival-list season — Pattinson’s talk-show movie, the L.A. Times TIFF nine. Digger is a different machine. It is a $125 million Warner Bros. date in October with an Oscar budget riding on top.

What the movie is, as far as anyone will say

Iñárritu is directing. IndieWire, working off the trailer and sources, described Cruise as a brash entrepreneur who somehow caused the end of the world and is trying to fix it. The comparison that keeps coming back is Dr. Strangelove. The studio language still says comedy. That combination should make anyone who bought a ticket to American Made sit up, and it should make anyone who only knows Cruise from the last four Mission: Impossible movies wonder if they walked into the wrong auditorium.

Variety noted this is his return to adult-oriented drama after more than a decade of action. In the last ten years the only non-action title on the list is American Made in 2017. You have to rewind further for Tropic Thunder, Valkyrie, Lions for Lambs, Rock of Ages. The Oscar people have been raising eyebrows since the project was announced, which is another way of saying they had a narrative ready: movie star does a character. The reactions blew a hole in that narrative before the campaign could laminate it.

Cruise went on the New Heights podcast and told a stopwatch story: a process that took six hours, a guy with a watch, Cruise grinding it under an hour while people told him it would never happen. It is a classic Cruise anecdote. It is also the kind of thing that plays better when the movie is Top Gun: Maverick than when the screening next door is calling the picture unpleasant.

Opens October 1.

The money is the other character

IndieWire’s September 17 piece is the one with the numbers. Production around $125 million, insiders saying the real figure is higher. Global marketing in the tens of millions. An awards campaign one insider put as high as $15 million. Break-even north of $300 million worldwide. Tracking for the domestic opening: $20 to $25 million, which the piece calls soft.

Do the ugly arithmetic. $125 million plus, say, $80 million in worldwide P&A and a $15 million campaign is already past $220 million in cash out the door before you count participations. Studios quote break-even higher than production plus prints because exhibitors take their cut. $300 million worldwide on a predicted $20–25 million opening means the movie needs legs, overseas, or both. Cruise films often do better abroad than the domestic chart suggests. IndieWire said that out loud. It is not the same as a guarantee.

A $20 million Friday-to-Sunday for a Cruise title used to be a disaster headline. After the last decade of action tentpoles, it is something worse for this particular movie: it confirms the adult-drama audience did not follow him, and the action audience did not follow the trench. Warner then has to choose between spending into a losing theatrical and spending into an Oscar narrative that needs people to have seen the thing.

I keep thinking about the mid-budget drama piece we ran in August. Digger is not mid-budget. It is a mid-budget idea wearing tentpole clothes. That is the expensive way to test whether adults still go to the multiplex in October.

Why the split might be the campaign

Davis’s Variety column makes a counterintuitive case: the divide is useful. Cruise has spent years as a symbol. Symbols do not win Best Actor. Weird, argument-starting performances sometimes do, especially if the actor is visibly not doing the job the public paid him to do. A veteran Oscar campaigner told IndieWire this is a movie star in a character role, and that he relished the same trick in Tropic Thunder.

Tropic Thunder was a hit, and the Les Grossman turn was a bit people liked. Digger, from the first-wave quotes, is not being received as a bit. Baffling and unpleasant are not “he’s so game.” They are “I wanted to leave.” You can still build an acting narrative out of that — look at the courage, look at the makeup, look at the refusal to wink — but you need critics to come around on a second viewing, or you need a guild branch that loves process more than pleasure.

The campaign is already launched. That matters because studios used to wait for the opening weekend to decide whether to spend the $15 million. Spending it now is a statement that theatrical is not the whole P&L. It is also a statement that they do not trust the opening.

Watch who they send to the lunches. If it is Iñárritu and a cinematographer, they are selling craft. If it is Cruise on every late show, they are selling the star and hoping the movie is an afterthought. IndieWire asked how far he will extend himself to promote a so-called comedy that may not be one. The honest answer is: as far as he always does, unless the reviews get worse after the embargo lifts.

What I would actually do with a ticket

If you liked There Will Be Blood more than Maverick, go opening weekend and be ready to be annoyed. If you liked Maverick more than There Will Be Blood, wait two weeks and read the second-wave reviews. The first reactions are a mood. Moods lie, but they are not nothing.

If you are going for Oscar homework, understand you are paying to be part of a rollout. The clip they will play at the nominees luncheon is already being chosen. You will not see that clip in context unless you sit through the whole trench.

I would not take kids. I would not treat this as a date movie unless both people like arguing in the parking lot. I would sit away from the Cruise-faithful rows, because those rooms police reactions.

International readers: the overseas pattern for Cruise is real, and a movie this odd can still over-index in markets that treat him as cinema rather than as a franchise employee. That will not help you if your local chain only booked it for two weeks in the small house.

October 1 is not an empty weekend

Lainey Gossip asked, the same week as the Variety reactions, whether Anne Hathaway’s Verity could beat Digger on opening weekend. I am not treating a gossip column as tracking. I am treating it as a reminder that Cruise does not own the first weekend of October. Adult thrillers and book adaptations eat the same 25-to-54 tickets Warner needs. If Verity is even moderately competent, some of the “I want a movie with talking” crowd has two doors.

Awards calendars make this worse. October 1 is early enough to look like a platform release and late enough that the movie has to hold screens through Thanksgiving to stay in the conversation. Festival titles we already covered — TIFF leftovers, Venice leftovers — will still be expanding. Cruise is not competing with Mission: Impossible. He is competing with prestige inventory that costs less to keep on a screen.

Guild screeners will go out whether the Friday is $8 million or $18 million. That is the $15 million campaign working as designed. The theatrical run is a billboard for the screeners. If you only care about Oscar math, the opening weekend is a vanity metric. If you care whether Warner repeats this bet, the opening weekend is the whole story.

Makeup, character, and the Tropic Thunder trap

The campaigner IndieWire quoted reached for Tropic Thunder because it is the last time a large audience enjoyed Cruise disappearing. Les Grossman was a cameo with a wig. Digger, from the trailer, looks like a lead performance in full-body commitment. Those are different asks. One is a spice. The other is the meal.

Iñárritu’s name on the poster is supposed to tell Academy branches this is cinema. It also tells civilians this might hurt. His commercial instincts are real — Birdman and The Revenant both found audiences — and they are not Maverick instincts. If the studio sells “Cruise comedy” on TV and the movie is a two-hour grimace, the Friday-to-Saturday drop will print the bait-and-switch.

The New Heights stopwatch story will be in every profile. It tells you how he wants to be seen: the man who refuses “never.” It does not tell you if the movie should have been ninety minutes. Plenty of brave swings needed a shorter cut more than they needed another take.

What this does not tell us yet

It does not tell us he cannot act. He can. It does not tell us Iñárritu lost his nerve. We have not seen the movie. It does not tell us Warner is “in trouble.” One October date does not rewrite a slate.

It does tell us the studio is willing to spend Oscar money on a title tracking like a shrug. It tells us the first people out of the screening could not agree on whether they had seen a swing or a mistake. And it tells us Cruise still wants the statue more than he wants another competent action opening.

October 1 is a Thursday-to-Sunday in some markets and a Friday in others. If the Friday number lands under $8 million, the $20–25 million tracking was optimistic. If it opens at $30 million, the tracking was sandbagging and the split reviews did not matter. Either way, the campaign will still be running at Christmas, because that is how these things work when you have already booked the lunches.

I am more interested in whether he shows up in a supporting category they have not admitted yet than in a Best Picture speech. The movie, from the trailer and the quotes, does not sound like a Picture package. It sounds like a performance package with a famous name on the poster. Those can work. They can also look like a man standing in a hole, asking the Academy to hand him a rope.

See it or skip it on the second weekend. Do not let the campaign decide before the movie does.