Tom Cruise has spent the better part of a decade casting himself as theatrical cinema’s last true believer, the movie star who insists audiences still want to leave the house. It is a neat, almost too-neat irony that his first film with Alejandro González Iñárritu hands him a character built from the same messianic wiring: Digger Rockwell, an oil baron and the most powerful man on Earth, sprinting to prove he is humanity’s savior from a catastrophe he caused. Warner Bros. is selling the film the way Cruise sells the medium — as an event too big to miss.

That pitch reached its loudest register in London this week, where Digger held its world premiere in Leicester Square as a Royal Film Performance in aid of the UK’s Film & TV Charity. As Deadline reported, the Prince and Princess of Wales worked the carpet alongside Cruise and Iñárritu, the actor at one point sending William and Kate into laughter before the party filed into the Odeon Luxe. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons joined them, with Salma Hayek and J.J. Abrams among the guests.

The premiere caps a collaboration 25 years in the making — Iñárritu and Cruise had circled each other since the director’s early breakout, and Digger is the rare studio swing that pairs a $125 million budget with an auteur’s black comedy. Shot across the UK over six months by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki in VistaVision, it reaches for the scale of a blockbuster and the sourness of political satire, a combination that split its earliest audiences between admiration and bafflement.

That divisiveness is precisely why Warner is leaning on old-world glamour. A royal premiere buys a difficult, expensive film the one thing a trailer cannot: the aura of a national occasion, the sense that missing it means missing the conversation. In a release calendar dominated by franchises and streaming drops, the studio is betting that spectacle around the movie can carry a movie that refuses to behave like one.

Digger opens internationally on September 30 before reaching IMAX and North American screens on October 2, landing at the front edge of awards season. The Royal Film Performance, a tradition dating to 1946, has historically been reserved for exactly this kind of prestige gamble.

Cruise spent the evening thanking the royals for what they “do for the arts.” The arts, in this case, being a $125 million comedy about a powerful man convinced the world cannot save itself without him.

Tags: Tom Cruise, Alejandro González Iñárritu, theatrical release, Warner Bros, Digger, royal premiere