This article has been updated to include the first full trailer for Digger, released July 13, 2026.
After months of teases, a retrospective trailer nobody asked for, and three character posters, Warner Bros. has finally dropped an actual trailer for Digger. Released today, July 13, the footage is the first real look at Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s satirical black comedy beyond the 20 seconds of Tom Cruise doing his best Les Grossman impression at the end of that career-retrospective reel back in June.
While Tom Cruise has spent most of the last few decades sprinting across the screen and hanging off planes without breaking a sweat, the 63-year-old actor is looking to return to more serious roles now that the Mission Impossible franchise has concluded. The official teaser for Digger is now online, Warner Bros. has locked in an October 2026 theatrical release, and a full-length trailer is set to debut on July 13. The studio also dropped a set of character posters — and Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell is in full unhinged mode.
And to prove just how serious he is about leaving Ethan Hunt behind, Cruise plays a balding Texas oil tycoon with a beer gut and a bad comb-over in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, a satirical black comedy. His new look is closer to Les Grossman after a three-day bourbon binge and a board meeting gone horribly wrong.
What the full trailer reveals
Unlike the earlier teaser, which was mostly a Cruise career montage with a handful of new seconds bolted on, this one is a proper trailer. It fills in the plot Warner Bros. had kept locked down for over a year: Cruise’s Digger Rockwell, described as the most powerful CEO on Earth, ignores warnings about a leaking Arctic drilling operation. The well blows, triggering an environmental catastrophe that threatens to spiral into global disaster. John Goodman, playing an ailing U.S. President, orders Digger to fix the mess he made — “Digger got us into this, and Digger’s gotta dig us out again” — and the tycoon sets off on a frantic, shovel-in-hand mission to save the world he broke.
The wider ensemble — Riz Ahmed, Jesse Plemons, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sandra Hüller, Sophie Wilde, and Emma D’Arcy — gets more to do this time around too, though Goodman remains the trailer’s biggest scene-stealer, further fuelling talk of a possible Supporting Actor nomination.
We know just how much Oscar judges love transformations. There’s an unspoken formula in Hollywood: take a handsome or beautiful actor and make them completely unrecognizable with makeup and prosthetics. It almost guarantees victory, or at least a nomination for the effort. Just look at Charlize Theron and Monster, Gary Oldman and Darkest Hour, Brendan Fraser and The Whale, Christian Bale and Vice. And that’s not even half the list.
The Teaser
The teaser (which only has about 20 seconds of actual footage from the new film, with the rest being a montage of other Tom Cruise movies) reveals Cruise as Digger Rockwell in all his sweaty Southern glory. With his thin white hair and a puffy face, he’s almost impossible to recognize. At one point he appears completely rattled after hearing about a Greenland ice sheet leak that threatens to spiral into worldwide catastrophe. The Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” plays in the background. The teaser had briefly leaked following its Top Gun / Top Gun: Maverick theatrical re-release before Warner Bros. swiftly pulled it — it’s now officially live.
Jesse Plemons describes the script as one of the “strangest, funniest, most tragic” things he’s ever read, comparing it to Dr. Strangelove.
Iñárritu has apparently been developing the movie for close to a decade now, with Cruise attached for seven years already. At CinemaCon 2026, Cruise told audiences, “It took 40 years for me to be able to put on the boots of Digger Rockwell and to reveal the many layers of the character.”
Iñárritu sounds just as stunned by Cruise’s transformation as audiences are. “Watching Tom Cruise become Digger Rockwell, I was not prepared for that,” the director said. “Embodying this character is another kind of fearless… this role could be his most challenging high-wire act.”
With everything happening in the world today, we probably need political satires with important messages like this to make the right waves in the industry. And it probably helps that Emmanuel Lubezki will handle all the beautiful cinematography.
Tom Cruise has always received praise from filmmakers over the years, with many believing that he’s one of the greats — particularly for his best dramatic work. Digger is a chance to silence haters. And based on what we’ve already seen, he’s going for gold.
Either way, nobody’s going to mistake him for Ethan Hunt here.
