“Digger” key art featuring Tom Cruise.
Warner Bros. Pictures
An ad for Tom Cruise’s new movie Digger is asking viewers to ignore critics who are panning the actor and director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s apocalyptic satire.
Digger — which also stars Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons and Sandra Hüller — starts showing in preview screenings on Thursday before opening in theaters nationwide on Friday. In the film, Cruise’s powerful oil tycoon Digger Rockwell causes an environmental calamity that threatens to end civilization.
The review embargo for the film lifted on Tuesday and Rotten Tomatoes critics mostly buried Digger from the get-go. Currently, the critics’ score on RT’s Tomatometer for the film is 52% “rotten” based on 147 reviews.
Stephanie Zacherek of Time Magazine is among the top critics on RT who assigned Digger a “rotten” score, writing, “Iñárritu and his star aren’t telling us a story; they’re selling us, relentlessly, on the genius of the movie they’ve made. This is reverse-engineered awards bait, a movie that insists it’s digging for the truth, when all it’s really doing is shoveling.”
RT-approved critic Barry Hertz of the Globe and Mail delivers one of the more scathing reviews of Digger, writing, “All these preening, obnoxiously self-satisfied moments, and so many more, add up to a movie so convinced of its own brilliance that it cannot see it is in fact the most banal variety of idiot: loud, ugly and forever oblivious to its own shortcomings.”
Also ripping Digger is David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter, who writes that the film is “basically what happens when you put two outsize egos together with nobody holding the reins to keep their most self-indulgent impulses in check.”
Rooney also writes in his THR review, “Piloted by a spectacularly obnoxious Tom Cruise, evidently spent hours in the makeup chair each day to look his age, Alejandro G. Iñárritus’ wannabe Dr. Strangelove is a heavy-handed cataclysm scenario built around the blunt point that any attempt to halt global warming this late in the game is pure political theater.”
With reviews like that, Digger’s studio, Warner Bros., apparently figured it was time to go on the defensive and launch an online ad to highlight some glowing takes on the movie. In an ad posted on X, some text simply reads, “Decide for yourself,” while an accompanying video featuring positive quotes from various outlets includes a couple of clips of dialogue from the film spliced in between.
Near the beginning of the 27-second spot, Cruise’s Digger Rockwell says, “You know what, f—k those people.” Toward the end of the ad, the phrase, “Same Film, Different Truth,” pops up on screen, before Digger appears once more, saying, “Never afraid to tell the truth. Whatever that is.”
You can see the new ad for Digger below. Disclaimer: The video includes swearing.
‘Digger’ Is Projected To Open Weak At This Weekend’s Box Office
Despite the post-review efforts by Warner Bros. to get audiences to make up their own minds about going to see Digger, the ad that calls out critics may be too little, too late.
As of Wednesday, some box office prognosticators were projecting that Digger could earn as little as $7.5 million in its opening weekend from about 3,500 North American theaters. Warner Bros., meanwhile, is projecting an opening of anywhere from $12 million to $15 million.
Earlier this month, one industry tracker — Box Office Pro — projected that the film was tracking to open in the $20 million to $30 million range.
If Digger opens on the low end of recent projections, the film will need to dig itself out of a big hole to become profitable. Variety reported on Wednesday that Digger got the green light for a $125 million production budget, “but according to four knowledgeable sources, the budget climbed to $160 million to $180 million after production went over schedule.”
Variety noted that in addition to the big production budget for Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, Warner Bros. spent $100 million to market the film.
Leave a comment