Tom Cruise is unrecognizable in the first full trailer for Iñárritu's 'Digger'

Warner Bros. put the first full trailer for Digger online Monday, and the movie it is selling is not the one Tom Cruise has been selling for the last decade. No jet, no motorcycle off a cliff. Instead: a fat, balding, sunburned Texas energy tycoon named Digger Rockwell, buried under prosthetics, talking in a slow Southern drawl about a hole he dug in Greenland.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu directed it. Emmanuel Lubezki shot it on 35mm in VistaVision. It opens October 2 in IMAX.

What the trailer actually shows

Rockwell has sunk a fortune into an ecological drilling project in Greenland. The project goes wrong. An iceberg comes loose, drifts off course, and the tsunami it is about to cause is headed for a nuclear plant on the Scandinavian coast. The cleanup bill, per the trailer's own framing, lands on American taxpayers, and the number has a lot of zeros in it.

The President of the United States, played by John Goodman with the alertness of a man being woken from a nap, decides the only person who can fix this is the man who caused it. Rockwell, meanwhile, is preoccupied with his sick cat.

That is the joke, and the trailer plays it straight enough that you can see the Dr. Strangelove shape of it: the apocalypse handled by the exact people least equipped to handle an apocalypse. Whether Iñárritu, a director whose comic instincts have historically arrived wrapped in three layers of despair, can sustain that for two hours is the open question. He has never made a straight comedy. Birdman was funny in the way a panic attack is funny.

The Cruise of it

The performance is the pitch. Cruise is unrecognizable, which is the point, and Warner Bros. is not being subtle about why. This is the studio that greenlit Sinners and One Battle After Another under Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, spent a reported $125 million on an auteur comedy with no franchise attached, and would very much like some Oscar nominations out of it. Cruise has three acting nominations, all from the previous century: Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, Magnolia. He got an honorary Oscar in 2025. He has not played a character actor role since Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder.

At a Q&A on the Warner lot last week, Cruise described the film as the culmination of his 40-year career and said Iñárritu spent several days reading him the script out loud.

"Alejandro took several days during which he was just reading the script to me and I'm listening to everything that's in his mind, so that I can understand that, and then I know how to contribute to it, and bring that collaboration together."

Iñárritu, finishing the film in London, sent a video instead of showing up, and quoted Cruise back at the room: "Alejandro, it took me 40 years to become this character."

Both of those quotes are the sound of an awards campaign clearing its throat. That is fine. Campaigns start somewhere, and the trailer is a better argument than either quote.

The rest of the bench

Sandra Hüller. Jesse Plemons. Riz Ahmed. Michael Stuhlbarg. Sophie Wilde. Emma D'Arcy. Burn Gorman. Robert John Burke. Goodman as the president. Iñárritu co-wrote with Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Nicolás Giacobone, two of whom were in the room for Birdman.

Shot at Pinewood between November 2024 and May 2025 under the working title Judy. The title Digger and a teaser arrived last December. This is the first time anyone outside the lot has seen what the movie looks like.

What to watch for

October 2 puts it in the awards corridor with a wide IMAX release, which is a strange place to put a black comedy about climate collapse and an incompetent president in an American election-cycle autumn. Warner Bros. is betting that a $125 million satire with a movie star under three pounds of latex can be both. It might be. It might also be the year's most expensive miscalculation. The trailer does not settle it, and it is not supposed to.