Digger trailer: Tom Cruise wreaks havoc on Earth, grabs a shovel to save humanity, watch

Tom Cruise-starrer Digger will hit screens on October 2, 2026.

Warner Bros. on Monday released the first full trailer for Digger, a satirical black comedy directed by four-time Oscar winner Alejandro G. Inarritu, starring Tom Cruise in the lead role.

In Digger, Cruise, known for decades of action roles and his long-running Mission: Impossible franchise, disappears beneath prosthetics, old-age makeup, a fake pot belly and thinning white hair styled into a bad combover to play Digger Rockwell, a reclusive Southern oil baron described as “the most powerful man in the world.” The film is billed as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.”

The trailer opens not with Digger itself but with a retrospective reel of Tom Cruise’s 46-year career, cutting through his Oscar-nominated performances in Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia before arriving at the new footage.

In the film, Rockwell ignores a critical warning about one of his oil pipelines and sets off a global ecological disaster that threatens to spiral into nuclear conflict. John Goodman plays an ageing US President who orders Rockwell to fix what he has broken. “Digger got us into this mess, and Digger’s gotta dig us out again,” Goodman’s president says in the trailer. What follows, set to the Talking Heads song “Burning Down the House”, is Cruise’s character grabbing a shovel and throwing himself headfirst into saving humanity from his own catastrophe.

At CinemaCon in April, Tom Cruise told the audience that the role in Digger was decades in the making. “It took 40 years for me to be able to put on the boots of Digger Rockwell,” he said. At a press event on the Warner Bros. lot last week, he elaborated on the process. “Whether it’s Les Grossman or Interview With the Vampire, Collateral or Risky Business, I’m always asking, ‘How do I communicate this?’ The physicality, the makeup, that is stuff that you find as you are learning how to communicate,” Tom Cruise said. Cruise also revealed that Alejandro G. Inarritu spent several days reading the script aloud to him before production began so that he could fully understand the director’s vision.

Inarritu, who is still in the UK finishing the sound mix and was unable to attend the trailer launch in person, shared a video message in which he described the film’s decade-long journey from idea to screen. “It was just after The Revenant, when I had an idea. Not a script, not a film, just a relentless, recurring obsession that has endured through all these wild years. I knew who this character was,” the director 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.”

On casting Tom Cruise, the filmmker said, “The film needed Tom. We wanted to work together since the beginning of the century. The transformation he went through was astonishing.”

Story continues below this ad

Also Read: Jurassic Park star Sam Neill dies at 78, months after beating rare blood cancer

Digger is Alejandro G. Inarritu’s first English-language film since The Revenant in 2015, which won him his second consecutive Best Director Oscar. He co-wrote the screenplay with Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Nicolas Giacobone. The film was shot over six months in the UK in VistaVision, with Emmanuel Lubezki, Inarritu’s longtime collaborator, behind the camera. Industrial Light and Magic and Legacy Effects handled the visual effects.

The ensemble cast alongside Tom Cruise includes Sandra Huller, Jesse Plemons, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, Michael Stuhlbarg, Burn Gorman, Robert John Burke and Pip Torrens. The film was produced by Legendary Pictures with a reported production budget of $125 million, continuing Warner Bros. co-chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy’s strategy of backing expensive, director-driven films following the global success of Sinners, which earned $370 million worldwide earlier this year.

Digger is Cruise ‘s first non-franchise film since 2017, when he starred in American Made and The Mummy. It is also his first project under the deal he signed with Warner Bros. in January 2024 to develop and produce theatrical films, reuniting him with the studio for the first time since Edge of Tomorrow in 2014. The film arrives in theatres and IMAX on October 2.