Tom Cruise is utterly transformed in Digger trailer

When Warner Bros. showed new footage of its forthcoming satirical black comedy, Digger, at Cinemacon in April, industry insiders considered it a highlight of the event. The general public hasn’t seen anything other than a title announcement and a teaser in May that largely provided a retrospective of star Tom Cruise’s career, with just 30 seconds of footage from Digger tacked on at the end. But now we have the official trailer, and it certainly lives up to that earlier enthusiastic word of mouth. We’re getting powerful Dr. Strangelove vibes, updated for our 21st-century times.

Digger is four-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s (Birdman) first English-language film since 2015’s The Revenant. The official logline is short and sweet: “The most powerful man in the world races to prove he’s humanity’s savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything.” That disaster appears to be ecological in nature and involves a rapidly melting iceberg, as well as some nuclear waste.

Cruise is often at his best when he takes big creative swings and plays against type—the rage-fueled motivational speaker in Magnolia, for instance, or the over-the-top movie mogul in Tropic Thunder. He’s almost unrecognizable in this new trailer as eccentric billionaire oil baron Digger Rockwell—wispy hair, potbelly, and all.

“The film needed Tom,” Iñárritu said via video at a Warner Bros. screening last week. “We wanted to work together since the beginning of the century. I admired him as an actor for years, and that wasn’t a surprise for me. The surprise was discovering that the human being behind the actor was just as extraordinary as the performances I will see throughout his career. The transformation he went through was astonishing.”

If the film turns out to be as good as this trailer, Cruise (and Iñárritu) might be looking at another Oscar nomination. John Goodman co-stars as a geriatric US president, with Mercedes Hernandez playing Digger’s housekeeper. The cast also includes Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, Robert John Burke, Burn Gorman, and Pip Torrens in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

Digger hits theaters on October 2, 2026.