New Footage From Tom Cruise’s DIGGER Looks Unlike Anything He’s Done Before
For more than a decade, Tom Cruise has been locked into full-on blockbuster mode, delivering massive action spectacles with the Mission: Impossible franchise and soaring back into the danger zone with Top Gun: Maverick.
While those movies have cemented his status as Hollywood’s premier stunt-driven movie star, his next project is taking him in a completely different direction.
A newly released Warner Bros. retrospective celebrating Cruise’s career included a brief but fascinating glimpse at Digger, the upcoming black comedy from acclaimed filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and it offers our best look yet at what will be the actor’s most unexpected role in years.
The footage is short, but it gives audiences a taste of Cruise’s dramatic transformation into Digger Rockwell, a character described as the most powerful man in the world. The visuals hint at something strange, chaotic, and completely different from the kind of films Cruise has been making lately.
The official logline teases a story that sounds both absurd and ambitious: “Introducing... Digger Rockwell. A comedy of catastrophic proportions. The most powerful man in the world (starring Tom Cruise) embarks on a frantic mission to prove that he is humanity's savior before the disaster he's unleashed destroys everything.”
This is the story of a man scrambling to fix a catastrophe of his own making while desperately trying to maintain his image as the world's savior. It sounds like the kind of sharp, satirical storytelling that fits perfectly within Iñárritu’s wheelhouse.
The Oscar-winning director is best known for films such as Birdman and The Revenant, and Digger marks a fascinating collaboration between two artists who rarely play it safe.
Cruise gets the spotlight, but he’ll be surrounded by an impressive ensemble cast that includes Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, Robert John Burke, Burn Gorman, Michael Stuhlbarg, and John Goodman.
The production itself was just as ambitious as you might expect. The movie was filmed over six months in the United Kingdom from late 2024 into 2025 and was shot on 35mm film using VistaVision.
While audiences are still waiting to see exactly what kind of madness Digger Rockwell unleashes, the newly revealed footage suggests that Cruise is stepping far outside his comfort zone.
After years of hanging from airplanes, riding motorcycles off cliffs, and saving the world through pure adrenaline, watching him dive into a darkly comedic disaster story feels like a refreshing change of pace.
Warner Bros. has officially set a worldwide theatrical release date for Digger on October 2, 2026.