A film poster is usually made by a graphic designer at the production company. For Digger, it was made by one of the most influential living American artists. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Tom Cruise and Ed Ruscha together unveiled an exclusive poster at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It happened on Sunday, September 27, 2026, just days before the film’s theatrical release on October 2. Look closer, though, and this isn’t an isolated encounter. It’s the intersection of three storylines that have been unfolding in parallel for the past year and a half, art, fashion and architecture. All three converged on exactly this one spot.
Layer one: Ruscha and Cruise
The collaboration between Ruscha and Iñárritu wasn’t thrown together for marketing. Their mutual admiration, according to several sources, stretches back more than two decades. The result is a poster carrying Ruscha’s unmistakable, almost indifferent visual language. It’s his signature deadpan aesthetic, in which the text feels as heavy as the image behind it. The poster is dominated by a massive, looming ice shelf against a slate-gray backdrop. The film’s title sits vertically down the center of the ice block. It’s framed by phrases in Ruscha’s own style: “A Man. A Plan. A Meltdown.” and “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.”
After an early screening, Ruscha said the film reminded him of a kaleidoscope, “so many round and round ideas.”
Layer two: Ruscha as a crossing point of art forms
Ed Ruscha has long stopped being just a painter, he’s someone fashion borrows from as readily as film does. Just a few months earlier. In May 2026, Jonathan Anderson staged his first Dior Cruise collection right at LACMA, at the very same site where Ruscha would later stand beside Tom Cruise.
The Dior Cruise 2027 collection was made with Ruscha as a direct collaborator. Shirts bore his work, clothes carried a film-noir edge, and Hollywood ran through it all as the shared thread. In under a year, Ruscha moved from canvas to runway to film poster. All three stops ran through the same building.
Layer three: LACMA as a crossing point of art forms
That building is no accident either. LACMA itself is the result of three architectural layers. The original 1965 complex was designed by William Pereira; two later additions came from Renzo Piano, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, BCAM for short (2008), and the Resnick Pavilion (2010).
(Worth noting: this isn’t the standalone Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles, that’s a different building in a different location, by different architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, opened in 2015. BCAM is part of the LACMA campus itself. Both carry the name of the same patron, Eli Broad, which is where the confusion comes from.) The newest layer is the David Geffen Galleries, by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, a building that replaced the original Pereira structures and now stretches across Wilshire Boulevard.
Zumthor is no newcomer when it comes to pairing architecture with fine art. In Vardø, Norway, he built the Steilneset Memorial with sculptor Louise Bourgeois, a monument to the victims of the Finnmark witch trials. Bourgeois created her last major installation for it, The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved, before her death in 2010. Zumthor has long done exactly what LACMA is doing now, building spaces that let someone else’s artwork move in, so that the building and the work strengthen each other.
Fun fact: this year, the Venice Film Festival premiered From Inside Out, a documentary about Zumthor’s architecture directed by Wim Wenders, best known for the cult classic Paris, Texas (1984).
So before Tom Cruise and Ed Ruscha ever stood in front of the cameras at LACMA, Zumthor already had his own film moment on the other side of the world.
Ice bigger than a man
Digger itself is a dark satire. Tom Cruise plays oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, whose drilling rig explosion in Greenland dislodges a massive ice shelf and sets off a global environmental disaster. It’s Cruise’s first non-franchise role in years, and Iñárritu’s return to English-language filmmaking. Shot on 35mm VistaVision, the film was lensed by multiple Academy Award winner Emmanuel Lubezki.
Practically speaking
Digger, from Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Entertainment, opens in theaters and IMAX worldwide on October 2, 2026. Alongside Tom Cruise, the cast includes Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons, Riz Ahmed and Michael Stuhlbarg.
