Cinema

More Trouble for Tom Cruise’s Digger as Hong Kong Pulls the Film

Tom Cruise's Digger vanished from Hong Kong and Macau cinemas two days before its National Day opening. The censor, the distributor and a studio in mid-takeover have all stayed silent.

Husam Sam Asi 7 October 2026, 12:24 · Updated 12 October 2026, 14:30

Tom Cruise in a scene from Digger. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Digger was due on Hong Kong’s IMAX screens on 1 October, China’s National Day, with Tom Cruise as a Texas oil tycoon who sets off a climate catastrophe. Two days earlier its showtimes vanished from cinema websites in Hong Kong and Macau, and advance sales stopped. More than a week later, no censor, distributor or studio has said who took the decision or why.

The film is the first English-language feature from Alejandro González Iñárritu since The Revenant, and Warner Bros. has sold it as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions”. Cruise, under heavy prosthetics, plays Digger Rockwell, whose drilling in Greenland triggers the disaster. John Goodman plays the president of the United States. The studio’s synopsis promises “the most powerful man in the world” on “a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything”. It opened in Britain, the United States and Taiwan on 2 October. In Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China it has no release date.

“Sensitive content”, then silence

The first reports came from the Hong Kong press. The news site HK01 found on 30 September that every screening had disappeared and that tickets could no longer be bought. The film’s local promoters did not answer its questions. HK01 and Sing Tao Daily attributed the withdrawal to “sensitive content” and “political satire”, and reported that the film might return if cuts were made, which would need the consent of the director and the studio.

Hong Kong Free Press put the question to the censor, the Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration (OFNAA). Its reply, as relayed by outlets that carried the report, was that it handles applications in accordance with the Film Censorship Ordinance. It did not discuss Digger. The Asia film-trade journalist Patrick Frater wrote in his newsletter that the film “had previously been advertised and approved by local censors”, and that the reason for its removal “remains murky”.

What the sensitive content might be is known only at second hand. According to Frater’s summary of speculation in the Hong Kong media, attention has fallen on two moments: a threat by the film’s fictional American president “to nuke China as a distraction”, and a line describing Chinese people as “yellow” and a “cancer”. Frater added that he had not seen the film and could not verify the dialogue.

Charles Mok, a former Hong Kong legislator, argued that the calendar mattered as much as the script. “For an important date of celebration and national pride like the National Day of China, such a reference about nuking China would be very bad luck at least, and highly disrespectful at worst,” he wrote in an analysis quoted by Frater. “The safest thing to do is, well, just to ban it.”

A law that needs no explanation

Hong Kong rewrote its Film Censorship Ordinance in October 2021, the year after Beijing imposed a national security law on the city. Censors must now consider whether a film would be contrary to national security. The chief secretary can revoke the approval of a film that has already been passed. Screening an unapproved film carries up to three years in prison and a fine of HK$1 million, and the review board that hears appeals is barred from reconsidering decisions taken on national security grounds.

The authorities’ own figures, reported by Hong Kong Free Press in October 2025, show 13 films refused approval on those grounds and 50 ordered to be edited since the change. The titles have never been published.

The cases that have come to light involved local independent films and festival shorts, with one foreign exception that set the pattern for Digger. In March 2023 the British horror film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was cancelled days before it opened. Its distributor gave no reason. OFNAA said the arrangements of cinemas for “individual films with certificates of approval” were “the commercial decisions of the cinemas concerned”, Al Jazeera reported. A film can be approved, advertised and then removed without any ruling that could be read, questioned or appealed.

Digger raises the stakes. It is a studio film that cost at least $125 million, led by the star of Top Gun: Maverick, and it disappeared on the eve of the national holiday. If OFNAA approved it and then withdrew that approval, the public is owed the reason. If cinemas or the distributor acted first to avoid trouble, the law has achieved its effect without being used. The official reply fits either account.

The film Hollywood once could not have made

Ten years ago a Hollywood script containing those lines would have struggled to reach the screen. In 2016, when the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda was buying its way into the American film business, UKScreen observed that it was “nearly impossible these days to find a Hollywood movie that depicts China negatively”, because the studios were already rewriting scripts to protect their access to Chinese cinemas. Wanda had just paid $3.5 billion for Legendary Entertainment, and within a year had removed its founder, Thomas Tull.

Cruise’s own career supplies the best-known example. In the 2019 trailer for Top Gun: Maverick, the Taiwanese and Japanese flags on his character’s jacket had been replaced with invented emblems while the Chinese group Tencent was an investor. They were back in the finished film in 2022, after Tencent had left the project.

Legendary is one of the two companies behind Digger, and its history tracks the change. Its management and the investment firm Apollo bought out Wanda’s stake in October 2024. Digger went into production in Britain the following month, with Iñárritu, Cruise and Legendary’s Mary Parent as producers. In April 2025, in the middle of a tariff war, China’s film administration announced that it would “moderately reduce the number of American films imported”. A studio film now has little to protect on the mainland, and its writers can put a threat against China into the mouth of an American president without a call from the sales department.

Hong Kong is where that freedom ends. If the reports are accurate, the nuclear threat comes from the film’s American president, a figure the satire sets out to ridicule, and Mok describes the film as a send-up of an American tycoon and American leaders in which China is incidental. A system that gives no reasons has no room for that distinction. A joke about American recklessness towards China appears to have been handled as an offence against China, and audiences in Hong Kong have lost a film about a man who wrecks the planet while insisting he is saving it.

A flop at home, and a studio that has changed hands

The film’s troubles extend well beyond Hong Kong. In North America it opened to $8 million, Cruise’s worst opening in 19 years according to TheWrap, with a further $12 million from 74 other markets. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a C+, and critics split almost evenly, at 51 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Its budget has been reported at anything from $125 million to $180 million before marketing, and TheWrap puts the likely loss above $150 million.

Warner Bros. answered the critics with a social media clip that set their verdicts against a scene of Cruise’s character cursing “those people”, Sing Tao Daily reported. Cruise, speaking to the interviewer Kevin McCarthy as the film opened, looked past the weekend: “I feel very much like we’re going to make something that is a lasting piece of cinema.”

Four days after that opening, Warner Bros. changed owners. On 6 October it became part of Skydance, David Ellison’s merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, and Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, the executives who backed Digger, are leaving. The new owners inherit the loss and the Hong Kong question together.

Three questions remain, and nobody is obliged to answer them. Did Hong Kong’s censor withdraw an approval it had granted, or did the trade pull the film first? Will Skydance accept cuts to get the film into Hong Kong, and would Iñárritu agree to them? And will any of the parties say so in public? Until one of them does, Hong Kong’s audiences are left with a blank where a release date used to be, and with a law that works best when nobody has to sign their name to a decision.

Sources: HK01; am730; Sing Tao Daily (29 September); Sing Tao Daily (1 October); Central News Agency; Dimsum Daily; Patrick Frater; Streamline Feed (reporting Hong Kong Free Press); Affari Cinesi (reporting Hong Kong Free Press); The Standard; Global Voices; Vision Times (reporting Ming Pao); Al Jazeera; Warner Bros. Discovery; The Playlist (trailer); The Playlist (Cruise); 1News; The Hollywood Reporter India; Fortune (Top Gun: Maverick); CNA (Top Gun: Maverick analysis); ABC7 News; TheWrap; Fortune (box office); Consequence; Axios.