Last month, movie fans around the world were delivered a very strange tease. A poster and silhouette-filled trailer arrived online promoting a new Alejandro G. Iñárritu film titled Digger starring Tom Cruise, and while we know it has an October release date and a tagline calling it “A Comedy Of Catastrophic Proportions,” we know virtually nothing else about it. You can certainly color me among those who were intrigued – and after reading the latest comments about the project from one of Cruise’s co-stars, I’m downright excited.
In a Variety profile, Bugonia star Jesse Plemons only very briefly discusses his work on Digger, but what he had to say should delight cinephiles everywhere. While we know that the movie is a comedy, what kind of comedy will it be? After offering up a wonderful mix of adjectives describing the Iñárritu creation, the actor compared it to a comedy classic: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Said Plemons,
It’s one of the strangest, funniest, most tragic scripts I’ve read. There’s a kind of modern-day Dr. Strangelove thing, and then it becomes something else entirely.
Having made multiple movies with the wild writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos, Jesse Plemons is in a position to know a lot about movies that are off kilter and offer up a mix of tones, and it sounds like he’s right back at that kind of work in the making of Digger.
As for the Dr. Strangelove comparison, I love to hear it, as Kubrick’s film is one of the all-time great comedies… but I also wish that there was some kind of follow-up explaining what he means. Does he make the comparison in the sense that it’s a movie that is built with multiple protagonists playing their own parts in the larger plot? Or is he referring to the world-ending stakes in play? It’s hard to know… and the idea of “and then it becomes something else entirely” makes it even harder to track.
Jesse Plemons is part of an awesome ensemble in the film that includes Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg, and John Goodman among others, but it has Tom Cruise in the titular role of Digger Rockwell, and the Breaking Bad actor apparently got a real kick out of getting to see him bring to life a brand new character (something audiences haven’t seen since 2017’s American Made):
Getting to see Tom just go for it — not in a death-defying action way but fully showing what an incredible actor he is — that was thrilling.
We still have a while to go before Digger arrives in theaters everywhere – the movie currently dated for October 2 – but we’ll surely get more insight between now and then regarding what to expect from the Tom Cruise/Alejandro G. Iñárritu team-up. Stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for all of the latest, most exciting updates as we get closer to the feature on the 2026 movie release calendar.