Tom Cruise Has Stopped Running. Now He’s Fighting the Critics.

Tom Cruise has spent the last decade hanging off planes, jumping motorbikes off cliffs and saving cinema one impossible stunt at a time.

Now he has a different opponent. Critics.

His new film Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is Cruise’s first original non-franchise movie in years and a very deliberate change of pace. He plays Digger Rockwell, a fabulously wealthy oil tycoon whose business helps trigger an environmental catastrophe, sending him into a strange, satirical attempt to save the world from a crisis he helped create. It is big, weird, political and very definitely not another Mission: Impossible.

And critics cannot agree on it at all.

Early reactions have ranged from “brilliant” and “masterpiece” to “baffling”, “unpleasant” and considerably worse. Rotten Tomatoes has hovered around the 50% mark, with top critics even less enthusiastic, while some reviews have praised the film’s ambition and Cruise’s willingness to completely abandon his usual heroic image. Others have described the whole thing as exhausting, self-indulgent and barely funny.

Normally, a studio would quietly ignore the bad notices and plaster the poster with whichever five positive words survived the embargo. Warner Bros. has done the opposite. Its latest campaign puts the praise and criticism side by side, flashes up reactions such as “magnificent” and “insufferable”, then tells audiences to “decide for yourself.” One clip even uses Cruise’s character saying “F--- those people” as part of the joke, effectively turning the divided reviews into the marketing hook. The tagline is equally blunt: “Same film. Different truth.”

It is either inspired or desperate. Possibly both.

There is something very modern about the strategy. Studios know audiences increasingly distrust critics, algorithms, online scores and, occasionally, everyone on the internet. So instead of pretending Digger is universally loved, Warner Bros. is selling the disagreement itself. You hated it? Excellent. Somebody else loved it. Buy a ticket and join the argument.

That is a risky move, especially because Digger was clearly designed as more than disposable entertainment. Cruise is working with a two-time Oscar-winning director, the film has Emmanuel Lubezki shooting in VistaVision, and the supporting cast includes Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and Michael Stuhlbarg. This is not Cruise sneaking in a strange little experiment between blockbusters. It is a major swing, and the mixed reaction makes that swing even more fascinating.

It also says something about Cruise himself.

For years, his brand has been built around certainty. He runs. He jumps. He flies. He wins. Digger asks audiences to watch him as something much messier: grotesque, egotistical, ridiculous and possibly unlikeable. That is probably why some critics are fascinated by it and others are recoiling from it.

And perhaps Warner Bros. has realised the only sensible response is not to hide the split, but to lean into it. So no, Tom Cruise is not fighting critics in the literal sense. He’s doing something more dangerous. He’s asking audiences to ignore the score, buy the ticket and make up their own minds.