The following contains spoilers for the film Digger.

Digger’s marketing campaign began not with a trailer but with a montage—a reel of previous performances by the movie’s star, Tom Cruise. There was Cruise in Top Gun, feeling the need for speed; Cruise in Jerry Maguire, committing to showing the money; Cruise in the Mission: Impossible films, dangling from various planes. The retrospective ended with a snippet of Cruise acting in Digger, but its message was clear: What the movie star of movie stars pulls off in this forthcoming project would be the pinnacle of Cruise-ian cinema, the performance he’s been building toward all this time.

As it turns out, the movie is indeed a historic entry in Cruise’s filmography—though likely not for the reasons anyone involved had hoped. Digger has become one of the worst-performing releases of his career, making roughly $8 million domestically during its opening weekend against a reported budget of up to $180 million. Few reviews are glowing; it also has the unfortunate distinction of being the final film released by Warner Bros. before the company’s acquisition by Paramount, a deal that closed this week. The promotional tone has shifted significantly—no longer are teasers celebrating the opportunity to see Cruise as people have never seen him before. They now offer a more desperate plea: “Decide for yourself,” one of the latest ads says, a shrug of a command.

That Digger’s marketing relied so heavily on Cruise’s star power isn’t surprising. But the film’s dramatic bombing at the box office proves the (literal) tomfoolery of making Cruise its only selling point. For years, the actor has adopted the persona of Hollywood’s unofficial mayor, stressing whenever possible the importance of seeing movies in theaters with crowds. Digger, however, has no trace of crowd-pleasing in its DNA. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, it’s a satire of a satire that’s both grandiose and grotesque, with a Russian doll–like story structure: At its center is a shouty black comedy about the apocalypse, which is caused by an oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell (Cruise). That tale is then revealed to be a play called Fossil Fools being staged by a harried crew and cast; its star, Curtis Markson (also Cruise), is growing anxious about the ethical implications of the show’s conceit, as well as a possible emergency that his daughter is facing. A final twist unveils the play as a retelling of a real story—that the events of Fossil Fools actually happened, give or take a few creative flourishes. Outside the theater, the world is a dystopian nightmare.

[Read: Hollywood’s star power is shifting]

The entire ethos of Cruise’s career thus butts heads dramatically with the film’s complexity and cynicism. Digger gets the most out of Cruise the actor, who delivers a captivating performance while juggling two characters throughout the film. But it can’t mine much out of Cruise the untouchable, one-note movie star. In an interview with GQ, the first cover story with the magazine that Cruise has agreed to in 20 years, he turned every question into an opportunity to wax poetic about the beauty of filmmaking. Despite being given opportunities to reflect on his career and why he’s been drawn to death-defying, larger-than-life roles, Cruise rarely conveyed anything beyond the talking point he kept pushing about “cinema” being his life’s passion. “What I like about cinema,” he said in response to an inquiry about his childhood, “is it is all of us coming together in a room and sharing an experience.”

Cruise has made staunch optimism about the movies his public narrative; for him, the theatrical business must and will succeed no matter what challenges befall the industry. “Hollywood has always gone through ups and downs,” he told GQ. “If you study Hollywood, they’ve been bust and bank and broke. I’m excited. I’m very excited about where movies are.” But Digger displays no such certainty. Rather, it argues that although art can endure the end of the world, overstating the importance of entertainment is silly. Fossil Fools, after all, is funded by a descendant of Digger Rockwell himself. A credit sequence further emphasizes the story’s pessimism by sounding the same warning that the theatergoers hear when the stage show ends; the real-life audience watching Digger is therefore encouraged to brace for a crisis as it leaves the building as well.

Digger isn’t the only film this year underlining the bleak world we’re in. Both The Social Reckoning, the writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The Social Network, and Artificial, the auteur Luca Guadagnino’s movie about the founding of OpenAI, are tonally different from Digger, but they contend with the same challenge Digger does: persuading audiences to spend a few hours in a theater absorbing disturbing stories about a reality they already know. The two movies also seem to face uphill box-office battles, despite featuring acclaimed actors: The former, starring the recent Oscar winner Mikey Madison, is on track for a soft opening this weekend, while the latter, with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, was dropped by its original distributor, Amazon MGM Studios; a smaller company, Neon, rescued the project. But even if these films also fail to become hits, at least they’re not hiding their messages behind the charm of their stars.