Tom Cruise's Digger forecast to lose $245m, one of Hollywood's biggest flops

Digger box office: about $35m against a $280m cost

Tom Cruise's new film Digger is forecast to lose about $245 million, Hollywood analysts said on Monday, after ticket sales fell by around 60% in its second weekend, the BBC reported. The satirical black comedy, in which Cruise plays oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, has taken about $35m worldwide so far. Warner Bros spent an estimated $280m to make and market it.

In rupees, that projected loss is roughly Rs 6,800 crore at today's interbank rate of about Rs 277 to the dollar (see our dollar rate page).

The numbers

The break-even figure is far above the budget because cinemas keep a share of every ticket and the studio is also expected to spend on an awards campaign. A Warner Bros spokesman told Variety the real break-even point was $300m, not $350m.

Why it matters

Digger is directed by Alejandro G Inarritu (Birdman, The Revenant) and was Warner Bros' last standalone release before its takeover by Paramount. Reviews were mostly poor, and the studio responded with a campaign telling audiences to "decide for yourself". If the forecast holds, it will rank among the biggest losses in Hollywood history, a sharp contrast with Cruise's recent Top Gun and Mission: Impossible hits. Cruise said last week he never thinks about films in terms of opening weekends, but about whether they last.

The Social Reckoning also struggles

Aaron Sorkin's sequel to The Social Network, The Social Reckoning, opened with just $5.5m in the US and about $9m worldwide. The first film took $22m in its US opening in 2010. The new film, starring Mikey Madison, Jeremy Strong and Jeremy Allen White, tells the story of a Facebook engineer who leaked internal documents to a reporter. It was beaten in the US chart by Other Mommy, Verity, Resident Evil and Brad Pitt's Heart of the Beast.