The first teaser for Alejandro Iñárritu’s Digger celebrated Tom Cruise’s remarkable career, taking viewers on a journey from blockbuster franchises like Mission: Impossible and Top Gun to acclaimed dramas such as Magnolia and Jerry Maguire, as well as early standouts like TAPS and All the Right Moves. The montage ultimately revealed Cruise’s latest transformation in Digger. Much like his unforgettable turn as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, Cruise sheds his trademark leading-man image to play Digger Rockwell, a balding, overweight oil tycoon with a thick Southern drawl. However, the teaser only offered fleeting glimpses of the character. Now, audiences are finally getting their first proper look.
Warner Bros. has just released a new trailer for Digger. After a couple of very brief glimpses, we finally get a good look at the film and its satirical humor. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, one of the richest and most powerful men on Earth. He’s also responsible for an ecological catastrophe that pushes the world to the brink of environmental collapse and nuclear war. With time running out, Digger embarks on a globe-spanning mission to try and undo the damage he’s caused.
In addition to Cruise, Digger also stars Sandra Hüller (Project Hail Mary), Jesse Plemons (Bugonia), John Goodman (The Connors), Riz Ahmed (The Phoenician Scheme), Michael Stuhlbarg (After the Hunt), Sophie Wilde (Babygirl), Emma D’Arcy (House of the Dragon), Robert John Burke (Robocop 3), Burn Gorman (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), and Pip Torrens (Preacher).
Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Digger was filmed on 65mm VistaVision. It will receive an IMAX release in multiple aspect ratios, including 1.43:1 for 70mm IMAX presentations, 1.50:1 for certain film prints and 1.90:1 for standard IMAX theaters. The cinematographer is legendary Oscar winner Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki.
A couple of Cruise’s co-stars in the film have expressed their excitement for the project. Plemons has previously teased that the film is something of a modern-day Dr. Strangelove, which jives with what Bumbray saw. “It’s one of the strangest, funniest, most tragic scripts I’ve read,” he said. “There’s a kind of modern-day Dr. Strangelove thing, and then it becomes something else entirely. Getting to see Tom just go for it — not in a death-defying action way but fully showing what an incredible actor he is — that was thrilling.“
Sandra Hüller told THR‘s Scott Feinberg, “I am nearly bursting wanting to talk about this movie. I can’t. I legally can’t. I can say that I saw a version [of it] that’s maybe not the final version, and that it impresses me beyond anything I’ve ever seen. And that’s all I can say. I think it’s going to be a remarkable film.”
Digger is set to be released in theaters on October 2.