Tom Cruise Goes Full Wildcard in 'Digger' — His Alejandro González Iñárritu Collab Is the Most Unexpected Movie of 2026

Tom Cruise Goes Full Wildcard in 'Digger' — His Alejandro González Iñárritu Collab Is the Most Unexpected Movie of 2026

If you thought Tom Cruise had already done the craziest things possible on screen — clinging to airplanes in Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, piloting actual fighter jets in Top Gun: Maverick, sprinting across London rooftops in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning — well, you clearly haven't seen what he's about to unleash with Digger. The 63-year-old action icon is trading globe-trotting spy stunts for something far weirder: a dark comedy directed by none other than Alejandro González Iñárritu. Yes, the five-time Oscar nominee behind The Revenant and Birdman is teaming up with Cruise for the first time, and the result looks absolutely unhinged.

Digger Rockwell: The Role Nobody Expected

At CinemaCon 2026 back in April, Cruise and Iñárritu took the stage to a standing ovation and dropped the first proper look at Digger. The character? Digger Rockwell — a filthy-rich, cat-obsessed billionaire with a bloated belly, a ridiculous comb-over, and a thick Southern drawl that makes him sound like he wandered straight out of a Faulkner novel. "It took 40 years for me to be able to put on the boots of Digger Rockwell," Cruise told the crowd, clearly relishing every second of this unrecognizable transformation.

The supporting cast is equally stacked. Jesse Plemons — fresh off his chilling turn in Kinds of Kindness — joins alongside Michael Stuhlbarg (who previously collaborated with Iñárritu on A Serious Man) and John Goodman, whose presence alone promises some heavy comedic chaos. Warner Bros. is distributing, and based on the footage shown, this is Iñárritu flexing a very different muscle than the survival drama of The Revenant or the existential theater of Birdman.

The Teaser That Split the Internet

In late June, Warner Bros. dropped a three-minute teaser that immediately sparked heated debate. The first two and a half minutes are essentially a Tom Cruise retrospective — a rapid-fire montage of clips from Risky Business, Jerry Maguire, Collateral, Edge of Tomorrow, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, and more. Then, in the final 30 seconds, the screen cuts to Cruise-as-Digger dancing with a shovel, dead-eyed and grinning, completely shattering the action-hero montage you just watched. Some fans called it "brilliant meta-marketing." Others felt bamboozled — "I sat through two and a half minutes of his old movies for 30 seconds of new footage?"

But that's exactly the point. Digger isn't just a new Tom Cruise movie — it's a deliberate dismantling of the Tom Cruise persona itself. The retrospective teaser forces you to confront decades of Cruise's image before yanking it away. Whether Iñárritu is crafting a biting satire of celebrity, wealth, and American myth-making — or simply making the weirdest comedy of 2026 — remains to be seen. Either way, this is the most unpredictable film on the calendar, and it might just be the one that finally shows us a Tom Cruise we've never seen before.