Tom Cruise, Failure and the Real Secret of Confidence and Success

His new film flopped at the box office. What he said beforehand shows us how to handle any setback.

A film can take years to make, and then a single weekend of figures decides, for most of the people watching, whether it worked.

Tom Cruise’s Digger has opened to disappointing box-office numbers and some bruising reviews. For the star of Top Gun and Mission: Impossible, that makes an irresistible headline.

Before the film came out, though, Cruise had said what he was hoping for, and it was a film people would still be watching in years to come. Speaking to Kevin McCarthy alongside the director Alejandro González Iñárritu, he explained that opening-weekend takings were not what he focused on while making a film.

It’s a question for anyone who has worked hard on something and then waited to hear what people make of it: whose idea of success are you going by?

The purpose behind the project

Digger asks something different of Cruise. It is an original, dark satirical comedy about power, greed and responsibility, and he plays an eccentric oil tycoon who sets off a catastrophe, a flawed man whose attempts at control become part of the problem.

That is a long way from the action hero and the spectacular stunts of Mission: Impossible. At a press event, Cruise called the film “totally original” and said it had challenged him in a way he hadn’t experienced before, and Iñárritu separately described the performance as a different kind of fearlessness.

My reading is that Cruise chose a project that would stretch him and backed a director with a distinctive vision, and that the creative ambition was a big part of the appeal.

He did want the film to make money. When he talked about that hope, he tied it to the people who worked on it and to the chance of more films like it getting made. He wanted an audience too, and at the same press event he talked with real enthusiasm about drawing people into the story.

Everything he said before the release points towards something he wanted to make: a film that challenged him, that lasts, and that helps keep original cinema going. That is Towards motivation, and it gives him a reason to keep faith whatever the first weekend brings. It also shows Internal Reference. The measures he talked about were his own, how much he’d grown, whether the work was good, what he’d learned from it, and those are judgements he can make for himself whatever the critics say.

Skill One: Identify Your Outcome

In The 7 Skills to impress™, the first skill is Identify Your Outcome.

Cruise’s interviews point to several connected ambitions: to keep developing his craft, to make distinctive work with lasting value, and to help keep original filmmaking possible. The opening weekend has a bearing on all of those, but it can’t decide them on its own.

He said all this before the film came out, so we know he wasn’t making excuses after a bad weekend. If those were the things he was aiming for, he can still judge the film by them, whatever the figures say. We can’t know how he’s feeling in private, but we know what he said beforehand.

You see the same thing in ordinary life. Someone building a business has a quiet launch and starts doubting the whole idea, a parent has one difficult conversation and wonders whether their child is getting any more independent, and a runner has one bad session and decides their fitness has gone backwards.

Set your Outcome before the first verdict comes in, and decide what evidence will tell you how you’re getting on over a sensible stretch of time.

Skill Two: Manage Your State

When things get difficult, a clear Outcome tells you what to concentrate on.

Without one, it’s easy to be pushed about by whatever people say. A good review cheers you up, a bad one flattens you. With an Outcome, you can stop and ask yourself what would actually help.

The most revealing thing Cruise said in his September interview with ABC was about control. He talked about accepting that he can’t control what happens and concentrating on doing his best. That is Internal Reference again, and it’s Manage Your State at its best. The box office, the reviews and the mood of the audience are all out of his hands, while the preparation, the performance and the effort he puts in are his. Spending his energy on those is what stops him being knocked about by everything else, and he’d said it before anyone knew how the film would do.

Every day, I’m thinking, ‘You know what? I can’t control what’s going to happen. But what I can control is I can just do the best I can.’

Tom Cruise, ABC News, September 2026

For the rest of us, the practical starting point might be 7-11 breathing, which gives you a moment to settle before you decide what to do. Then come back to your Outcome and pick the next useful action. This is Stops and Shots. You deal with the next thing in front of you, the part you can do something about, and you don’t have to solve the whole situation at once. That’s what keeps it from becoming overwhelming.

I’d expect that outlook to help Cruise in the same way, giving him a way to stay purposeful even while the disappointment stings.

Skill Five: The Elevate Formula

The next challenge is the meaning you attach to a setback.

The Elevate Formula helps you check whether a difficulty has become Self, Lasting and Broad, meaning something wrong with you, something permanent, and something that spreads into everything.

A disappointing opening is one result, for one film, at one point in its life. The financial consequences may well be serious, but the film’s long-term reputation is still undecided. Cruise and Iñárritu talked about Blade Runner as a film whose standing grew over time, and Cruise recalled the long cinema runs of Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July. None of that promises Digger will become a classic, though it does put a single weekend in proportion.

So keep the disappointment Narrow enough to look at properly. How a film, a launch or a match is judged a year later is often very different from how it was judged on the day. Think about the audience, the timing and the wider circumstances alongside your own decisions, and be honest about which parts were in your hands. Then put your effort there. In GQ, Cruise described going back over what worked and what didn’t. It’s Stops and Shots again: take responsibility for what you can learn, and use it to make the next thing you do better. You can accept a poor result without letting it become part of your Identity.

Your next response

If you decide what success means to you before anyone else gets a say, a bad first reaction is much easier to cope with.

You won’t get to choose how people first react to your work. You do get to choose your Outcome, how you manage your state, and how much weight you give the setback.

So when your own opening weekend comes, whatever form it takes, which measure will you be using?

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Sources

• The Wall Street Journal (via To Vima): Tom Cruise’s Big-Budget ‘Digger’ Bombs at the Box Office.
• On Film…With Kevin McCarthy: Episode 65: Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu talk Digger.
• Podcast transcript: Opening of the Kevin McCarthy interview.
• Variety: Tom Cruise Defends ‘Digger’ After Box Office Flop Opening Weekend.
• GQ: Tom Cruise: Hollywood’s Most Elusive Star Speaks, September 2026.
• ABC News: Chris Connelly interview, 23 September 2026.
• GamesRadar+: Tom Cruise on the creation of totally original new movie Digger.
• Reuters: Tom Cruise touts wild dark comedy Digger to theater owners, 15 April 2026.