No, Digger is not a musical. Yes, people genuinely believed it was. That’s where we are now. A director makes a serious drama with Tom Cruise and the internet decides it must be a song-and-dance number because reasons.
The film is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first English-language feature since The Revenant, which alone should tell you the vibe. He doesn’t do light. He does men in crisis, often in nature, usually with a lot of yelling and some very long takes. Putting Tom Cruise in the middle of that is a genuinely strange, genuinely exciting idea.
The plot, as far as anyone knows, follows a man with enormous power who has done enormous damage and now has to reckon with it. Cruise plays someone who believes he’s the only person who can fix what’s broken, which is either heroic or delusional depending on the scene. Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, and Sophie Wilde round out the cast.
So where did the musical rumor come from? Probably a pile-up of small things. Iñárritu has talked about rhythm and music in interviews for years. The score was recorded with a live orchestra. Someone saw a set photo with a piano in it. Congratulations, you now have a genre.
It’s also worth remembering that Tom Cruise hasn’t done a proper drama in ages. He’s spent the last decade jumping off things for our entertainment. The last time he played a complicated man in a room full of adults, people acted like it was a magic trick. He’s genuinely good at it. People forget.
The film is being positioned as a big theatrical event, which means somebody at the studio has seen it and liked it. That’s not nothing. Studios don’t schedule awards-season slots for movies they’re nervous about. They schedule them for movies they think can survive a conversation.
Does the not-a-musical thing actually matter? Not really. But it says something about how we consume movies now. A trailer drops, a rumor starts, and within a day the internet has written an entire alternate version of the film in its head. Then the real thing shows up and has to compete with a movie that doesn’t exist.
Digger lands in theaters in October, which is exactly when a movie like this wants to land. Big screen, serious faces, adults in rooms making terrible choices. No singing. Promise.
There’s also the Cruise factor. The man has been a movie star for forty years, and he’s still one of the few actors who can get a stranger off the couch and into a theater. Watching him trade a harness for a monologue is the entire pitch. He did it in Magnolia. He did it in Born on the Fourth of July. He can do it again.
And if it turns out there’s one musical number tucked in there somewhere, fine. We’ll survive. Nobody’s buying a soundtrack for this one. The rumor was more fun than the truth, which is basically how the internet works now. It’s a drama. Act accordingly.
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