John Hannah Walked Out of Tom Cruise's 'Digger' ... 'It Was a Mess'

Tom Cruise's Digger just took its strangest hit yet ... John Hannah, the man who survived three Mummy movies, could not survive this one. Metro reports the Scottish actor walked out of the cinema entirely.

Asked by the Cinema Kai Nation podcast whether he enjoyed the film, Hannah answered with an immediate "no", then kept going. "I don't think I've left a film before. I just can't believe what they were thinking. I don't know what they were thinking there."

Pressed on what broke him, the 64-year-old got specific. "I think it was just trying to be too many different things. You know, it was a play within a film. I mean, it was a film of a play within a film with kind of theatrical quarters. It was a mess."

The numbers are worse than the reviews

Hannah's walkout landed the same day Variety reported that Alejandro González Iñárritu's environmental satire is now tracking to lose $245 million for Warner Bros. Ticket sales fell 60% domestically in the second weekend, bringing the global total to $35.3 million against a budget that swelled from $125 million at greenlight to as much as $180 million.

The film needs roughly $300 to $350 million worldwide to break even, per the studio and Variety's sources. It is expected to finish around $50 million. As this desk covered on opening weekend, Digger's $7.5 million debut was already Cruise's worst since Lions for Lambs in 2007. The second weekend confirmed the first one was not a fluke.

Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an aging oil tycoon whose drilling sets off an ecological disaster, alongside Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons and Emma D'Arcy. A cast like that is supposed to be insurance. It turned out to be overhead.

Then Anne Hathaway showed up with a 10/10

Not every famous viewer headed for the exit. Anne Hathaway, whose thriller Verity beat Digger at the box office in their shared opening weekend, used her very first Letterboxd review to defend it, per Deadline. "I loved this brilliant movie. It's smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious," she wrote. "It's worth making the time see and decide for yourself what you make of it. For me? 10/10."

She gave it five stars. The Hollywood Reporter notes the split is real across the scoreboard too. Critics sit at 52% on Rotten Tomatoes while the audience score is 73%, and Letterboxd users average 3.8 out of 5 across almost 350,000 ratings. The paying public that did show up mostly liked it. There just were not enough of them.

The marketing campaign asked for this

Warner Bros. sold Digger with a "Decide for Yourself" campaign that positioned divisiveness as the ticket. Here is our read. That framing does not stop working when the movie leaves theaters, it just changes who runs the campaign. Hathaway's 10/10 and Hannah's walkout are both the marketing now, delivered free of charge by people with bigger audiences than most paid media buys.

The asymmetry is the lesson. A celebrity defense reads as loyalty, especially from Hathaway, who stars opposite Cruise in the Days of Thunder sequel due June 2028. A celebrity walkout reads as news, because nobody expects The Mummy's nice guy to torch a Tom Cruise film on the record. Outrage and candor travel further than praise, which is exactly the mechanic the "Decide for Yourself" pitch was trying to harness while the studio could still sell tickets against it.

Cruise, for his part, has not engaged with any individual verdict. After the opening he posted that he was "so honored to have had the opportunity to create this film alongside such talented artists" and "so proud of what we created", per The Hollywood Reporter. Hannah's team had not commented further as of publication.

The number to watch is the final writedown. Variety says the loss lands near $245 million when the run ends, which would put Digger alongside John Carter and The Marvels in the all-time bomb conversation.

Ad Watch News is an independent commentary site with no affiliation with Tom Cruise, John Hannah, Anne Hathaway, Warner Bros., or any party named here. This piece draws on published sources listed below.

John Hannah Walked Out of Tom Cruise's 'Digger' ... 'It Was a Mess'

The numbers are worse than the reviews

Then Anne Hathaway showed up with a 10/10

The marketing campaign asked for this

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