The $135 million apocalypse satire "Digger" starring Tom Cruise is tracking an $8 million to $12 million opening this weekend, according to Page Six. The studio's new "decide for yourself" promo opens with a quote from a film influencer with 4,895 TikTok followers, then cuts to the movie's oil baron character yelling "F-ck those people."
When a movie dies, the machine does not apologize. It rebrands the corpse as "divisive." The tracking numbers were the execution: originally a $20 million to $30 million range, then $20 million, now $8 million, on a budget seven times the size of Birdman. And the studio's answer is a promo that does not ask you to see the film, it tells you to decide for yourself, which is a demand, not a pitch. That is not marketing. That is a hostage situation where the hostage is your wallet.
The worst part is the influencer. In July, Cruise hand-picked film-critic influencers for a press event on the Warner Bros. lot, the kind of gathering Page Six called "weird and controlled." Now the film's only decent number is a 53 percent Rotten Tomatoes score that Page Six notes was "probably" boosted by the same crew. That is not a review ecosystem, that is a revolving door. One veteran producer at a PGA screening said "the air left the room," then added that "literally, nobody read the script." A movie with no audience is a subpoena for the marketing department.
The math is the joke. Inarritu made Birdman for $18 million and swept the Oscars. This one cost $135 million to open at the level where a holdover out-earns it. The comparisons to Ishtar and Waterworld are already out, and the only honest promotional material for this movie is the Ed Ruscha poster: an iceberg. A man. A plan. A meltdown. The top is the premiere. Everything else is underwater.
YOUR TURN: Is "decide for yourself" the last stage of a movie's death, or the new opening weekend?
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