Digger sold itself on Tom Cruise and tanked, is the era of the movie star over?

Did you catch Tom Cruise’s GQ profile a couple of weeks ago?

It was the superstar’s first sit-down, longform magazine interview in quite a number of years, and the reporter peppering the questions, Zach Baron, is no hack.

The piece was titled “Tom Cruise: Hollywood’s Most Elusive Star Speaks” and while it may have technically been accurate – Cruise did form sentences and said them out loud - it wasn’t in spirit.

Across dozens of questions, Cruise’s every response was a variation of “I love movies, I am movies, movies are humanity and how good are movies?”. Yay for movies! An admirable but unrevealing sentiment.

That was all in service of the narrative of Cruise as the last movie star, the kind of old-school power that enchants and seduces, that has the pull to get audiences into cinemas. A name that could sell tickets.

Except it didn’t.

Digger, the Tom Cruise-led climate catastrophe satire, opened this weekend to a paltry $US20 million around the world ($US8 million in North America and $US12 million in international markets). That US and Canada number is the lowest opening for a Cruise movie since Lions for Lambs in 2007, not adjusted for inflation.

The result is almost as big a disaster as the environmental collapse depicted in the film. Digger had a production start budget of at least $US125 million, and most industry trade reports put the end figure at between $US150 million to $US180 million.

Even at the lower end, Digger would need to gross at least $US300 million to break even – the chances of that happening is about the same as all nations on Earth agreeing to actually, substantively tackle climate change by the end of the year.

If Cruise isn’t the last movie star, then that’s it. Being mega-famous is not enough.

The actor isn’t the movie star anymore, the story or the character is, and more often than not, that’s based on existing intellectual property. Cruise isn’t the movie star, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is. That’s why Top Gun: Maverick grossed $US1.49 billion.

Digger was a bold creative swing for Cruise. He has spent the past nine years playing only Maverick and Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt. You have to go back even further, to 2012’s Rock of Ages, to find a role that wasn’t an action hero.

After a decade and a half of curating a particular image as this all-conquering superstar who can hang off planes and jump a motorcycle off a cliff, it’s a crash down to Earth and the final blow to the myth of the 21st century movie star.

As it turns out, audiences didn’t really care about seeing Cruise reclaiming his previous thespian talents. They only wanted to see him as a daredevil – and even that’s debatable.

Digger has some secrets in its story structure that makes it hard to market with full honesty, the point is to not reveal what the movie “really” is. It’s also essentially an arthouse flick with scale and an even bigger budget, along with an auteur filmmaker in Alejandro G. Inarritu. It’s not exactly an easy mainstream sell.

But Cruise is – or they thought he would be. The first trailer video wasn’t even about the movie, it was an unabashed celebration of Cruise’s career, clipping together a montage of his work from 38 previous films, ranging from crowdpleasers such as Top Gun and Jerry Maguire to more esoteric fare including Vanilla Sky.

The whole Digger promotional tour was engineered around Cruise’s appeal, the idea that you were going to see a version of him that you hadn’t before – bald cap, fat suit, prosthetic ageing make-up. It was still a bombastic performance, but it was different.

It didn’t help that Digger was divisive. It’s sitting on a Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 51 per cent, and a Cinemascore (audience exit polling in the US) of C+. Not great.

If the word-of-mouth had been better, perhaps we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but we also know that whether a movie is “good” or not won’t necessarily reflect its commercial success.

Psychological thriller Verity opened on the same day and has an even lower Rotten Tomatoes verdict at 34 per cent and the same damning grade from Cinemascore. But that grossed three times the multiple of Digger at $US62.5 million worldwide. It’s not a massive box office, but the film only cost about $US40 million to make.

Cruise alone isn’t enough to sell a movie, which means even the last movie star of the 21st century, a cultural era dominated by franchises and brands (Harry Potter, Marvel, Fast & Furious, Minecraft, Barbie), isn’t one, not by the classical definition anyway.

Audiences like Cruise, mostly. He hasn’t completely been able to shake off the stink of his full-tilt Scientology days of the 2000s when he was speaking out against psychology and the rest.

The concerted effort to minimise those aspects of his life, at least as part of his public persona, has gone hand-in-hand with remaking him as an action hero and saviour of cinema. It has largely worked, but he exists more as a celebrity figure who turns out to support other filmmakers’ work and the sender of a white chocolate coconut cake to his famous pals at Christmas time.

When people decide to see a Cruise movie, it’s a matter of Cruise-plus. It’s Cruise plus Mission: Impossible, Cruise plus Maverick. It’s Cruise plus what else have you got? If that “else” is an ambitious and shouty arthouse satire about climate change, they’re not buying.

We’ve actually been here before. The Cruise as action superstar narrative has become so successful, it’s easy to forget why he’s been so focused on playing just Ethan Hunt and Maverick.

The last non-Mission/Top Gun movies Cruise made until now was in 2017. One was a reboot of The Mummy franchise, which was also meant to herald in a new shared movie universe of the classic monsters from ye olden times, aka, the 1910s to the 1950s.

In the 2010s, Marvel was printing money at the box office and while DC had a patchier slate, every studio wanted their own version of these connected movies.

The Mummy, starring Cruise, Annabelle Wallis and Sofia Boutella was meant to be the first of the Dark Universe. Russell Crowe had a small role, intended as a springboard for the next instalment, a Jekyll and Hyde film. Johnny Depp had been cast as the Invisible Man and Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s monster.

The Mummy was a failure. It was ripped by critics, and grossed $US410 million at the box office – which would now be considered a pass mark (Digger would kill to make $US410 million) but in 2017, that ranked it 23rd for the year and nowhere enough for a supposed franchise-starter.

The plans were scrapped and everyone was let out of their contracts. Universal has since made standalone monster movies at much smaller budgets and without A-listers.

The other movie that year was American Made, a likeable Doug Liman film (the two had previously worked together on The Edge of Tomorrow) inspired by a real-life pilot who became a drug runner for the Colombian cartel and then became an informant for the US authorities.

That movie did OK ($US135 million from a $US50 million budget), as did Edge of Tomorrow ($US381 million from a $US178 million budget), Oblivion ($US287 million from a $US120 million budget), Jack Reacher ($US218 million from a $US60 million budget) and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back ($US162 million from a $US60 million budget).

Throughout the 2010s, that was Cruise. Unless it was one of the Missions: Impossible, his movies were profitable but not barnstormers. They were fine.

But even Ethan Hunt’s action hijinks couldn’t sustain. After the creative and commercial highs of instalments five and six (Rogue Nation and Fall Out), the Missions: Impossible also petered out.

Chapter seven, Dead Reckoning, and the last one, The Final Reckoning, both underperformed, earning $US571 million and $US598 million respectively.

Those numbers look decent but not when you consider the collective estimated production budgets of between $US500 million to $US750 million – the receipts ballooned from Covid-related stoppages and Cruise’s demands for ever-more ambitious stunt set-pieces.

It’s not just Cruise. In the past 10 to 15 years, we’ve seen over and over again so-called movie stars whose top billing on a film fail to move the dial on audience interest.

A Margot Robbie movie makes huge money if it’s Barbie but not if it’s Amsterdam or A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. A Brad Pitt movie does really well if it’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or F1 but not if it’s Babylon or Bullet Train.

A Julia Roberts film grosses decently if it’s Ticket to Paradise with its familiar rom-com set-up, but not if it’s After the Hunt, a challenging morality drama. Ryan Gosling makes money on Project Hail Mary but not The Fall Guy.

Whether it’s that old-school echelon of movie stars (Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Matt Damon) or newer celebrities (Sydney Sweeney, Glen Powell, Zendaya, Tom Holland), it’s the project not the person.

It can be an original story, as Project Hail Mary and Ticket to Paradise were, but both those films play within a familiar genre and have recognisable tropes.

So, if actors are no longer movie stars in the box office sense, who are?

Usually, it’s intellectual property, but even that’s no longer a guarantee as the likes of Marvel, Minions, DC, Fast X and West Side Story have all recently discovered.

But there’s a different power base that’s become a bigger draw, and that’s the director-auteur-author-creator.

Director Christopher Nolan seems to be the only box office guarantee at the moment. Whatever he makes, audiences will go see it, even when it’s a three-hour historical biopic about a nuclear scientist.

Verity did relatively well not because it was Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, it was because it was also based on a Colleen Hoover book, and no matter what you might think of Hoover’s writing abilities (ahem), she has a massive fanbase thanks to TikTok.

Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard no longer has the same pull, but Greta Gerwig and Quentin Tarantino still might.

Backrooms and Obsession both raked it in because a young audience turned out for a genre they like (horror) and because those films were directed by well-known online creators in Kane Parsons and Curry Barker.

The new Resident Evil movie has great reviews and good box office, and a huge part of that is because director Zach Creggar (Weapons, The Barbarian) has built a cult around his work.

It’s a new world where the likes of Creggar and Hoover, people whose photos you probably wouldn’t recognise in a “who am I” sheet at pub trivia, are bigger draws than Cruise, one of the most famous people on Earth.

Digger was a test and it didn’t work, which means we’re unlikely to see Cruise make any more audacious creative choices. He’s probably not going to make another Digger or Magnolia. His next two movies? Top Gun 3 and Days of Thunder 2.