Special Report: Digger (2026)

The Projection Booth and The Kulturecast cross the streams to dig into Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's bombastic, heavily spoiled satire starring Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon racing to convince the world he can fix the Arctic disaster he caused. Mike White and Chris Stachiw land on opposite sides of the "is it a $125 million folly or a willfully strange swing worth defending" debate, but agree the film's biggest surprise is its structural twist.

They dig into the cast firing on all cylinders (Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller as Emma Rockwell, John Goodman's increasingly unhinged dictator-president, and Jesse Plemons as Kenny, whose late reveal recontextualizes the whole film), the production's garish, Lanthimos-adjacent art direction, and why the movie's box-office failure and its placement as Warner Bros.' swan-song release before the Paramount merger became as much a talking point as the film itself. They also get into Cruise's career-long pattern of go-for-broke choices, from Tropic Thunder to Vanilla Sky, and whether this one eventually finds its audience the way The Bride likely never will.

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