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Tom Cruise might finally have his Oscar moment. The first trailer for Digger, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, dropped this week – and industry insiders are already calling it Cruise’s strongest shot at an Academy Award nomination since 1999.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a wealthy Texas oil tycoon described in early marketing as “the most powerful man in the world.” The character sets off a global ecological disaster, then spends the rest of the film trying to convince everyone he’s humanity’s only hope for saving it.
That premise has drawn immediate comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb — the 1964 political satire that turned Cold War paranoia into dark comedy.
It’s not hard to see why.
Iñárritu isn’t exactly a stranger to awards season. He’s the filmmaker behind Babel, Birdman, and The Revenant — the last of which finally earned Leonardo DiCaprio his first Best Actor win. Iñárritu himself walked away with Best Director trophies for both Birdman and The Revenant, so he knows exactly what the Academy tends to reward.
You can watch the trailer below; Digger hits theaters on October 2.
The supporting cast reads like an awards-circuit fantasy draft: Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, Burn Gorman, Robert John Burke, Michael Stuhlbarg, and John Goodman all appear alongside Cruise.
The Marketing Is Already Playing the Oscar Game
Here’s what’s interesting — the campaign for Digger feels like it’s angling for Cruise’s awards case before the movie’s even out. The very first teaser wasn’t a scene from the film at all. It was titled “DIGGER – Tom Cruise Retrospective Trailer,” a three-minute reel celebrating five decades of his career in Hollywood.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s a campaign.
Cruise hasn’t picked up an Oscar nomination since 1999, when he landed a Best Supporting Actor nod for Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s ensemble drama. Since then, he’s built an entire second career as Hollywood’s last true action movie star — but that’s largely kept him out of the awards conversation.
Take a look at his filmography since 2000, and the pattern becomes obvious. The only movies without action sequences he’s appeared in are Vanilla Sky, Lions for Lambs (a movie so obscure even film writers forget it exists), Tropic Thunder (technically action-adjacent, but Cruise’s character sits out the chaos entirely), Valkyrie, and Rock of Ages. That’s the complete list.
So while Cruise basically redefined what a stunt performance could look like on screen, he hasn’t led a straightforward drama built around his acting since Valkyrie in 2008. And he hasn’t starred in a non-action film from an Academy Award-winning director since Vanilla Sky, made with Cameron Crowe back in 2001.
That’s nearly a quarter-century gap — which is exactly why Digger is generating this much buzz already.
