Hollywood Rallies Around Tom Cruise's 'Digger.' Audiences Already Voted.

Tom Cruise's "Digger" has become one of the biggest box office flops in memory, and Hollywood has rallied around it. Stars are praising the film online. Audiences are staying home. The gap between the two says a lot about the movie business.

The numbers

The R-rated dark comedy, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, opened Oct. 2. It stars Cruise as an oil tycoon whose company sets off a potential catastrophe. In its second weekend, ticket sales fell 60% domestically, bringing its totals to $14.4 million in North America and $35.3 million worldwide, Variety reported.

Warner Bros. greenlit the film for $125 million, but the budget grew to $160 million to $180 million when production ran long. The studio spent another $100 million on marketing. Variety's sources said the film now stands to lose $245 million in theaters and will likely end its run with about $50 million worldwide. It would need $350 million to break even, though a Warner Bros. spokesperson put that figure at $300 million.

The timing is rough for the studio. "Digger" is Warner Bros.' last standalone release before its merger with Paramount, and not one of the studio's films this year has crossed $100 million domestically, according to Variety. Cruise also has a deal that lets him earn a percentage of revenues before the studio recoups its costs, which pushes any profit even further away.

Reviews were so harsh that the studio ran social media ads urging people to "decide for yourself," Variety reported.

Hollywood closes ranks

Several big names have come to the film's defense, Vanity Fair reported Wednesday. Anne Hathaway called it "smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious" on Letterboxd. Jane Fonda wrote on Instagram, "It was a big, brave risk for him to take on this role and he was very good in it and very brave." Director Guillermo del Toro posted a short message on X telling followers to love the arts and, with a profanity, to ignore the charts. Mandy Patinkin also encouraged audiences to go, Variety reported.

Ambition is not the problem

There is something to admire in the defense. Big studios rarely risk serious money on an original story anymore. Cruise has spent years making sure audiences get their money's worth, and he took a chance on something strange. Wanting more original films and fewer sequels is a fair hope.

But the defense also reveals a habit Hollywood cannot seem to break. When ordinary Americans decline to buy a ticket, the industry's first instinct is to treat the audience as the problem. "Ignore the charts" sounds noble from a famous director. The charts are just a record of what millions of families decided to do with their limited time and money on a Friday night. Those people are not philistines for passing on a $180 million satire about an oil tycoon.

Audiences have not stopped going to the movies. They have shown again and again that they will turn out for stories that respect them. Many Christian families have backed modest films made with care. The Kendrick brothers' small first movie is still being remade more than two decades later, as Dock Line wrote when "Flywheel" came home from Brazil.

Scripture has a word for the industry here: "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18). That is not a judgment on Cruise, who took a real creative risk. It is a warning about an industry that spends lavishly, shrugs at the people paying for it and then blames them when they stay home.

Jesus told a parable about a man who started building a tower without first sitting down to "count the cost" (Luke 14:28). Studios might take notes. Count the cost. Respect the audience. Make the kind of story people want to share with their families. Then the charts will take care of themselves.

Hero photo: Gabriel Hutchinson via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped and resized.