Digger

Digger Rockwell is an oil tycoon, and currently the most powerful man in the world. Around a Greenland glacier he unleashes an ecological catastrophe whose scale he doesn't himself grasp — and the dictatorial President of the United States promptly puts him in charge of averting it. From there Digger races, at deranged speed, to prove that he is humanity's saviour before his own handiwork destroys everything. The film describes itself as a comedy of catastrophic proportions.

Iñárritu carried this character around for ten years. The idea came after he finished The Revenant, and then went nowhere for a long time: "I had an idea. Not a script, not a film, just a relentless, recurring obsession that has endured through all these years. I knew who this character was. I knew how he spoke, how he survived, how he seduced reality into agreeing with him. But it took me 10 years to do this film, because I wasn't looking for a story. I was looking for the right way of saying it." He eventually wrote the screenplay with Sabina Berman and with his Birdman co-writers Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris.

He began approaching Tom Cruise about the lead in 2019, on the set of Top Gun: Maverick — Cruise turns out to be a long-standing admirer, having seen Amores perros on its original release. To build the character, Cruise spent days listening to the director read him the script. The result is the most drastic transformation of his career: grey hair, a paunch, a double chin, a Southern accent and a belt buckle of the kind only the largest egos wear. The Hollywood Reporter rated the footage shown at CinemaCon among the best of the year.

The film was shot on 35mm using VistaVision — the wide-negative process recently brought back into view by The Brutalist. Emmanuel Lubezki is the cinematographer, working with Iñárritu for the third time after Birdman and The Revenant. The six-month shoot took place at Pinewood Studios under the working title Judy; the score is by British musician Cosmo Sheldrake, his first for a feature. The $125 million budget is part of Warner Bros.' current strategy of deliberately backing auteur-driven films after the success of Sinners and One Battle After Another.

Alongside Cruise, Riz Ahmed plays a scientist, John Goodman the President, Sandra Hüller Digger's sister and Michael Stuhlbarg the Vice President, with Jesse Plemons, Emma D'Arcy, Sophie Wilde and Burn Gorman in support. The world premiere is in London on 22 September 2026, with the Hungarian release on 1 October — which means there is as yet nothing meaningful to say about the film's reception.