According to Deadline, Tom Cruise's Digger, the $160 million Alejandro G. Iñárritu film that opened to $8 million and is expected to lose around $150 million, has assembled a celebrity defense squad: Ben Affleck called the criticism "a little bit like the high-school bullying thing," Neil Young declared on his website that it is "the best film I have ever seen," and Anne Hathaway gave it a 10/10 with a shovel emoji.
Get the score straight first. Digger opened to $8 million across more than 3,300 theaters, the lowest opening for a Tom Cruise lead in 19 years, and went from $20 million worldwide to an estimated $150 million in the hole. The CinemaScore came back C+, and the crowd that bought it was 60 percent men between 18 and 34. The exact audience the studio bought the movie with gave it a C. That is not a controversy. That is a report card. And the response to the report card from the people on the poster has been what Hollywood always has on hand: a defense squad.
Ben Affleck said it on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, a venue chosen with the wisdom of a man who knows exactly where the clip ends up, the internet. His words: the criticism is "a little bit like the high-school bullying thing, with people who hadn't even seen movies," and if you punish movies that take risks you get "a bunch of sh*y homogenized movies." Notice the structure. The audience is the bully. 3,300 theaters worth of them, in aggregate, in writing, with a letter grade. And the solution to a movie that failed is that its failure was a character flaw in the people who failed it. The "homogenized movies" half of the quote would be a reasonable sentence at a film festival panel. It is less reasonable on a podcast, said by a man defending a movie that just lost a hundred and fifty million dollars.
The squad has depth. Neil Young, on his website, calls Digger "the best film I have ever seen" and adds that none of the reviews he has read describe it adequately. Mandy Patinkin calls it "an instant classic" and "one of the greatest pieces of film I have ever seen in my entire life," which is the same sentence he has been able to say about a lot of things since 1992. Anne Hathaway, who has a role in Digger, wrote that she "loved this brilliant movie" and rated it 10/10, and attached a shovel emoji. The shovel is the key detail. The movie is called Digger, the poster is a man holding a shovel, and the movie's own star posts a shovel. Nobody on the squad posted a ticket stub. That is the whole strategy: the movie is not going to be seen by the people who love it. It is going to be loved by the people in it.
So here is what the defense squad is actually doing. The movie is dead at the box office. It is not coming back, and the numbers are not going to change. But a movie with an A-list cast telling you that the audience is bullying it is a free second trailer, and an "instant classic" from an instant classic is a free article about the movie. The audience paid $16 to see a C+ and got a C+. The defense squad paid nothing and got the last word. That is the machine. The box office is the only critic that can't be quoted.
YOUR TURN: The movie is dead and the squad is talking. What's the last time a celebrity defended a bad movie by calling the audience a bully, and did it work?
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