by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
It’s on like Doggie Kong this Oscar run-up to the race for Best Actor 2027, with Tom Cruise in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger and Brad Pitt in David Ayer’s Heart of the Beast, affectionately known as Dogger here. Come this Oscar Season, although Cruise has clocked forty-five years hanging from planes, running on trains, banging death with helicopters, picking off aliens and international assassins? Pitt may finally beat TC at the box office with a German Shepherd.
Call it Digger vs Dogger. We’ve got the dog-like Digger “First Billion Dollar Movie Star” or Heart-throb dog lover turned box office banger in Heart of the Beast.
Out this Friday in theaters, Heart of the Beast is written by Cameron Alexander from 2017 when his script outshined other screenwriters on Industry inside platform The Blacklist. Like shooting the death star for Luke Skywalker, Cameron exploded into the Hollywood firmament.
Director David Ayer, whose filmography runs through Training Day, End of Watch and Pitt’s Fury, said the screenplay made this bad-boy filmmaker cry, allegedly. Ayer dubbed HOB a “tone poem”: one man, a dog, mountains, grief, survival. Pitt shed some tears too over this canine opus sprung from a pro and amateur Blacklist talent pool. Dog Odin is a whole other piece of high-end doggerel.
Brad is James Belmont in this movie, an ex-Special Forces mission expert who crash-lands his floatplane, pontoons over teakettle, into Alaskan white-waters. Whereby Odin nabs his human companion from the jaws of icy death.
Played by ride-share named dog Uber, allegedly an actual New Zealand mountain-rescue GSD, Odin was doubled even tripled by his own pups Seeka, Ryker, and Hondo. Ayer wanted Pitt on a par with Uber as co-companions, according to sources. Upping him by plus one, Pitt reportedly said Odin should be No. 1 on the call sheet.
Yeah, movie star humility is tricky. We get the drift, though, this Odin has the eponymous heart and is the box office beast.
On to Box Office Combatant Tom Cruise, a year older than Pitt, who plays Digger Rockwell “the most powerful man in the world,” who has no dog but a rheumatic cat dying of old age. Rockwell is a feisty crusty old man who has raked the planet mercilessly, who then has to save said world by course-correcting his Earthly eco-mistakes. The secret weapon for TC here is genius Director Alejandro González Iñárritu. And Digger is Iñárritu operating at his max on the auteur meter.
This four-time Oscar winner hatched Digger about 10 years post The Revenant, which notably finally won another A-Lister, a grateful Leonardo DiCaprio, Best Actor. Cruise, who has a producer credit on this one, weirdly announced that Iñárritu spent “a few days” reading the screenplay to him, since TC frankly admits “I don’t read.”
Hey, rumors are true, Nobody in Hollywood reads, ps.
Not since Barbenheimer has there been a really meaty match-up like this, Digger vs. Dogger, even if the beefcakes have been around the clock in Hollywood’s timeline. Cruise, 1962 vintage, vs Pitt, born in 1963, last sucked each other’s blood onscreen as Lestat and Louis in Anne Rice’s 1994 neck-puncture classic, Interview with the Vampire. (Blame her for all trampire sluck that came after this worldwide hit, just kidding.) Both leading men, then in their primer rib, famously had some clashes on the set. Mostly weirding each other out, staying in character, tense in period costumes, with brawls in make-up and stunt blood.
But nothing a little Formula One racing adrenaline couldn’t fix, when Tom Cruise star-crashed Brad Pitt’s FI red carpet in June of 2025. Ever since the late blue-eyed legend Paul Newman showed Tom Cruise the racing ropes, even showing up in the icon’s 2015 documentary “Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman,” TC has been all-in on hot wheels. Pitt’s out-and-out smash hit F1 soothed the souls for both, no stakes driven only race cars and bonhomie on track.
So who wins at the Oscar checkered flag come Award Season?
Maybe the dog, who has legs… four of them?
Go see Heart of the Beast, and Digger. You decide, Movie Star or Sex Symbol/Movie Star.
Official sites Paramount and WarnerBros, @HeartoftheBest and @diggerthemovie on Socials.
Don’t ask what happens after the PSKY WB merger, which California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently and reluctantly gave the final OK to, because who can say ParamountSkyDanceWarnerBrothers three times fast?
(If you choose Pitt and the dog, it may cost a TC famous annual coconut cake, which by the way Diane Keaton discovered first and introduced him to, just for the culinary record.)
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