Digger Opens to $8M, Cruise’s Lowest in 19 Years; Verity No. 1

Warner Bros.’ Alejandro G. Iñárritu satire Digger, starring Tom Cruise as oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, opened to about $8 million domestically — Cruise’s lowest wide North American weekend since 2007’s Lions for Lambs ($6.7 million) — while Amazon MGM’s Colleen Hoover thriller Verity took No. 1 with an estimated $33.6 million, Deadline and Variety reported from Saturday’s weekend tracking.

Friday receipts set the tone. Variety clocked Digger at $3.4 million from 3,321 theaters after mixed-to-negative reviews and soft word of mouth; Deadline’s Saturday update locked the three-day estimate at $8 million. The Hollywood Reporter likewise framed an roughly $8 million open below Warner’s earlier $12–15 million internal hopes. Production budgets cited across the trades run from a greenlit ~$125 million to $160 million–plus after an elongated shoot — figures that make the theatrical split especially punishing if ticket sales stay thin.

Audience grades were cool. Deadline and THR both record a C+ CinemaScore for Digger, with Rotten Tomatoes critics near 51% while the audience score sat higher around 71% in early tallies. Deadline’s exits sketch a coastal, male, younger buyer: about 73% male, 60% ages 18–34, coasts contributing a larger-than-average share, and premium large formats close to half of the gross. Iñárritu has said he aimed the film at Gen Z; tracking chatter quoted by Deadline mixed curiosity about Cruise with confusion over whether the marketing sold satire, apocalypse comedy, or self-parody.

Verity, directed by Michael Showalter and starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett, posted $15.1 million on Friday en route to the $33.6 million weekend estimate, Deadline and Variety agree — the second-best theatrical open for a Hoover adaptation after It Ends With Us. Both newcomers earned C+ CinemaScores; Deadline notes Verity’s crowd was about 79% female. The weekend’s broader chart kept Sony’s Resident Evil near $12 million for a ~$124 million domestic cume, with Paramount’s Heart of the Beast and A24’s Primetime filling the next slots ahead of or beside Digger, depending on the outlet’s midday update.

Cruise answered the soft open with public pride rather than spin. In posts covered by Deadline, he said he was “so honored” to make the film with the cast and crew and “so proud of what we created.” Guillermo del Toro separately defended the movie on social media as “daring, bold and cinematically complex” and “decidedly a theatrical experience,” Variety reported — a filmmaker-to-filmmaker counterweight to the opening-weekend math.

Marketing reach also lagged Cruise’s recent franchise peaks. Deadline cited RelishMix social follower tallies of about 289.5 million across major platforms before open — sharply below Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and well behind Top Gun: Maverick — and tracked RelishMix sentiment sliding from the mid-8s in mid-September into the mid-6s by midweek. Variety separately catalogued an all-stops press push (GQ cover, a New Heights podcast stop, late-night tunnel stunts) that still could not blunt Friday’s $3.4 million. Those context points reinforce the dual-source consensus without inventing Monday ledger actuals.

This package stays on the box-office and reaction facts dual-sourced above and does not rehash separate Warner film-chair exit coverage already live elsewhere on the site. For readers tracking studio releases on Hollywood, verified as of Oct. 3–4 reports: Digger ≈ $8M / C+ / Cruise’s lowest open since 2007; Verity ≈ $33.6M / No. 1; dual Deadline and Variety tallies align on the headline numbers without inventing Monday actuals still pending final studio reports.