Tom Cruise’s upcoming film Digger makes his whole career part of its marketing campaign
Tom Cruise has played only one type of character for almost a decade, but his latest role is going to remind you he used to do a lot more. And if you’ve forgotten, it’s here to remind you.
It’s been almost a decade since Tom Cruise has played someone that wasn’t Ethan Hunt or Maverick, which makes his upcoming film Digger a very big deal.
Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu, Digger is primed for an October release and also features Sandra Huller, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg and Australian actor Sophie Wilde.
The production has kept it relatively mysterious so far, revealing only that the story is “the most powerful man in the world races to prove he is humanity’s saviour before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything”.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.The tagline for Digger is “A comedy of catastrophic proportions”.
While Cruise has built a formidable reputation this past decade for being the superman of stunt work, famously performing his own daredevil actions on the Mission: Impossible films and the Top Gun sequel, the flipside of that is maybe audiences have forgotten his long and varied career over four decades.
This new kind-of trailer from Digger seeks to reinforce that Cruise is a movie star of the old-school variety. The video is a retrospective clipped up with scenes of his many roles over the years in a montage of “remember when you loved him in?”.
Among them are clips from Magnolia, Interview with the Vampire, Jerry Maguire, Rain Man, Risky Business, A Few Good Men, Edge of Tomorrow, Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Rock of Ages, Collateral, Minority Report, Born on the Fourth of July, Days of Thunder, Far and Away, Tropic Thunder, Cocktail, War of the Worlds, The Last Samurai and, obviously, the Mission: Impossibles and Top Guns.
Everything is there – serious drama, raucous comedy, rom-com, sci-fi action, crime thriller, historical epic, raunchy teen caper, psycho-sexual erotic drama, and whatever Vanilla Sky was meant to be.
It’s a really clever piece of marketing that captures the breadth and depth of Cruise’s career, which reflects how much his public reputation has bounced back from that Scientology-associated nadir in the back-half of the 2000s.
Back then, no studio would’ve hinged a promo campaign based on Cruise’s personal appeal.
The video then positions Digger as the culmination of his life’s work. The clips package builds to a line of voiceover dialogue it actually borrowed from the trailer of the final Mission: Impossible movie, “Everything that you are, everything you’ve done, has come to this”.
The trailer then transitions into about 30 seconds of teases from Digger, set to Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing.
It’s worth noting that across Digger’s promo activities, the film has yet to reveal Cruise’s face in character. What you see is either the character in silhouette, mostly from behind, or in wide shot.
There are lots of eyes on this collaboration between Cruise and Inarritu (Birdman, 21 Grams), who directed Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant and, finally, to that Oscar win.
Cruise has been nominated three times previously for an acting Oscar (Born on the Fourth of July, Magnolia and Jerry Maguire) but has never won. Earlier this year, he was awarded an Honorary Oscar.
Industry observers have pegged Digger as potentially an awards play and a chance for Cruise to finally claim a competitive Academy Award.
