Amid a Box Office Disaster, Tom Cruise Still Gets a Lifetime Achievement Award
The American Film Institute announced this week that it will give Tom Cruise one of the film industry’s highest lifetime achievement honors. In the same month, Cruise’s new film became Hollywood’s biggest box office flop of the year.
The honor is the AFI Life Achievement Award. The ceremony will be held April 24 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Director John Ford was the first recipient in 1973, and Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington and Nicole Kidman have also received the award. Kathleen Kennedy, chair of the institute’s board of trustees, called Cruise a global icon. Films starring Cruise have taken in about $13 billion at the worldwide box office.
His new film, Digger, opened Oct. 2. It was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the filmmaker behind Birdman and The Revenant. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a 65-year-old Texas oil tycoon. Wearing a bald cap and prosthetics, he looks far removed from the Tom Cruise audiences know.
Rockwell’s company splits the Arctic ice sheet during drilling in Greenland, and an enormous iceberg begins moving toward Europe, setting the disaster in motion. The film is more interested in what happens after than in the disaster itself. The man who caused the catastrophe tries to package himself as humanity’s savior instead of taking responsibility. The studio’s own description calls him the most powerful man in the world. It is a satire dressed as a disaster movie.
The market was cold. The film took in about $8 million in its opening weekend in the United States, the lowest opening for a Cruise vehicle since Lions for Lambs in 2007. It missed the studio’s own forecast of $12 million to $15 million. Receipts fell 60 percent in the second week, and Warner Bros. pulled the film from more than 2,500 theaters in the United States ahead of its third week. The worldwide total so far is $35.3 million.
Set against the spending, the hole is easy to see. The production budget started at $125 million and swelled to nearly $180 million, and marketing alone cost about $100 million. Variety estimated the film’s losses could reach as much as $245 million.
Reviews split. On Rotten Tomatoes, the critics score stood at 52 percent and the audience score at 71 percent, and CinemaScore, the grade given by opening weekend audiences, was a C-plus.
Major names, meanwhile, have lined up in its defense. Anne Hathaway gave the film a perfect 10 on Letterboxd, the movie rating app. Jane Fonda wrote that Cruise taking the role was a big, brave gamble, and that the film had found an original and dangerous way to wake people up to the climate crisis. Director Guillermo del Toro and actor Mandy Patinkin also publicly praised the film’s boldness. The judgment that it is a climate film suited to this moment sits alongside the judgment that it is a failure stuffed with excess.
An acting Oscar for Cruise has moved out of reach once again. He has been nominated three times, for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia, but he has never won in a competitive category. Digger was his first original film outside an action franchise since American Made in 2017, and it was widely read as a bid for awards season. Amid the box office failure and the split reviews, that bid has effectively ended.
The industry’s honors are traveling a different road. Cruise received an honorary Oscar at the Academy’s Governors Awards last November. The AFI Life Achievement Award extends that run. It is a judgment by his peers, separate from the verdict of the market.
The announcement carried other news as well. Cruise will return as Cole Trickle in a sequel to Days of Thunder. The market turned away from Cruise the satirist, while the industry is heaping awards on the Cruise of the 40-year career. Verdicts this far apart are rare.
