A quiet start for Cruise's latest swing
With the Paramount Skydance Corp. acquisition set to close on Oct. 6, Digger is Warner Bros. Discovery's final release before the handoff. The film, directed by Alejandro Iñárritu, puts Tom Cruise in a role far from his usual lane of the past two decades.
He plays a theater actor portraying an oil magnate responsible for an environmental catastrophe, a shift from action franchises such as Mission: Impossible. Industry tracker Rentrak tallied an $8 million opening and a No. 5 finish, trailing releases including Verity from Amazon.com Inc.'s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Sony's Resident Evil.
Another tough weekend in a bruising year
Digger severely underperformed at the domestic box office, adding to a difficult run that already includes The Bride! and The End of Oak Street. Together, those two have left the studio with losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Reviews for Digger were mixed, and even a robust marketing campaign could not budge its debut higher.
Box office numbers are a live read on consumer spending and studio balance sheets. Market Briefs covers the business behind the screen free every morning.
Who is in and who is out after the merger
On Friday, Bloomberg said Warner's film studio leaders, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, are not slated to join the combined entity when the deal wraps next week. Peter Safran and James Gunn, the duo heading DC Studios within Warner Bros., are set to move to the new company, alongside HBO Chief Executive Officer Casey Bloys and a number of additional Warner Bros. Discovery executives. Looking ahead, Paramount Chief Executive Officer David Ellison has outlined a combined slate of 30 releases annually across the two studios, with Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, the sitting Paramount Pictures chairs, overseeing that pipeline.
Why this matters for your portfolio
A soft $8 million start for a star-led release is a reminder that the box office recovery is uneven, even as new leadership and a bigger slate are on deck. At a Producers Guild of America screening held in late September, Cruise expressed hope that the film would perform well enough to fund Christmas bonuses for employees and encourage more projects like it. For your wallet, the upshot is simple: what gets released, who runs the slate, and how theaters and streamers share the spotlight can shift what you watch and where you pay for it.
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