The Misfiring Marketing Campaign for Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’

This article contains spoilers for “Digger.”The complete commercial failure of “Digger”, Tom Cruise’s biggest flop in two decades and potentially of all time, can be ascribed to several factors. It is a difficult arthouse film, like most of its director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s work, masquerading as a laugh-out-loud mainstream comedy. Imagine Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice” coming on like Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder”, and you have an idea of how total the gap between audience expectations engendered by the early marketing and the finished product is. It is an extraordinary exercise in wrong-footing viewers, so much so that there is a valid argument to be made that around 80% of the film is deliberately bad, in terms of the OTT performances, clunky dialogue, and headache-inducing thematic assault on various social sacred cows. This, naturally, makes it neither a good film nor, as it turns out, a successful one.The major problem that “Digger” has is that it is, essentially, impossible to market without spoiling what is clearly intended as its biggest twist. For the first 30 minutes or so, the viewer believes that they are watching a crass, artificial and wholly unfunny black comedy revolving around the character of Cruise’s Digger Rockwell, a squillionaire oil man whose carelessness has caused untold damage to the environment and which will ultimately result in the death of millions. Then the first switcheroo reveals that Cruise is, in fact, playing an actor named Curtis Markson, who is taking the role of Digger in a 25-year-anniversary production of a satirical play, “Fossil Fools,” that retreads the events that have led to the current global devastation.Tom Cruise in ‘Digger.’ Warner Bros.Had the marketing been straightforward about what the film really is — not an appallingly overblown satire but an examination of the tensions between art and life, not so very far away from Iñárritu’s “Birdman” — then there would not have been the shuddering breakdown of audience expectations. Yet the conscious decision was made months ago, from the very first teaser trailer, to sell the “fake” film, or rather its stage equivalent, and wholly conceal what was really going on.This, clearly, was in keeping with any twist-laden mainstream picture, a strategy that once paid remarkable dividends who can forget the marketing campaigns around 1990s films such as “The Crying Game” and “The Sixth Sense”, both of which essentially revolved around seeing the films before the central revelation was spoilt — but audiences now have become jaded and suspicious, especially if the picture in front of them is thought to be substandard. (See Matthew Vaughn’s “Argylle,” where all the early hype revolved around the question as to whether it was based on a novel that Taylor Swift had written. Spoiler alert — it was not, and the substandard “Argylle” flopped.)Yet “Digger” does not have the kind of twist that marketers can do much with. So, they decided upon adopting a higher-risk strategy: Lean into the film’s divisive qualities and hope to generate buzz among discerning, or at least curious, audiences. Negative reviews have been juxtaposed with positive ones, presumably to suggest the picture is a controversial love-it-or-hate-it attraction.Unfortunately, this strategy suggests damage control rather than confidence in the finished product. It feels like an attempt to appeal to what has quickly emerged as the film’s core audience: arthouse moviegoers on the East and West coasts, rather than in Middle America, where the film has barely registered. hence the opening weekend’s dismal $8 million gross.Warner Bros. marketing team then appears to have decided to cut its losses and start piling into America itself, juxtaposing some of the picture’s lines about how “America has stood beside the world in its darkest of hours” with the snarky response “Not any more.” Positive reviews from international critics in countries such as Britain, France and Japan got juxtaposed with negative comments from United States writers. This, unfortunately, came across as anti-American and so the studio behind a picture that is said to have cost as much as $180 million, stopped deleted the advertisements on X over the weekend, contributing to a growing sense that nobody behind the film and its marketing has much of an idea what they are doing. That impression has only been reinforced by reviewers — both positive and negative — having to point out that they did not write the words attributed to them or that their publications were incorrectly identified. Jim Hemphill, who reviewed “Digger” in glowing terms for IndieWire, asked Warner Bros. on X to remove a false credit in its promotional video identifying him as a writer for the Cosmic Circus website. Kyle Smith, the Wall Street Journal’s film critic, also pointed out that his criticism of the film on social media had been presented as coming from the New York Post, where he has not worked for nearly a decade. The marketing campaign descended into a level of chaos that Digger Rockwell himself might have enjoyed.Tom Cruise promoting ‘Digger.’ InstagramThe obvious move with a divisive picture like this would have been to debut it at a high-profile film festival, such as Venice, and then gauge early reactions before planning the marketing campaign. But Warners had been badly burned by the 2024 flop “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which received a dismal reception and then bombed at the box office, so were keen to treat “Digger” differently.Hence a high-profile — if inevitably bemusing — Royal Film Command Performance in London to launch the film, followed by a series of appearances by Cruise, most notably in a spectacularly unrevealing GQ cover interview that sought to strengthen the argument for the picture’s artistic qualities. Hollywood celebrity friends of the filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron, and Glen Powell have publicly sung its praises on social media, and it is clear that with the film’s flop credentials firmly established, the next stage will be to argue that it will be reassessed in years to come as a misunderstood masterpiece.We shall see. Critics are still debating the merits of “Heaven’s Gate,” which was a flop of similar proportions, and long ago decided that the likes of “Revolution” and “The Postman” do not need to be rehabilitated. The commercial failure of “Digger” has meant that heads will roll, and so the visionary chairs of Warner Bros, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, received their marching orders last week, being told that they will be surplus to requirements under the Skydance regime that has notoriously merged Warners and Paramount to create a new studio.It is both amusing and ironic that the picture that is the final one put out under the Warners banner is every bit as iconoclastic and downright strange as many of the others produced by the studio in its time. While watching “Digger,” I was reminded of everything from Hal Ashby’s “Being There” to Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” starring Mr. Cruise — both Warner pictures that ventured into territory the mainstream eschewed and have since become cult classics and staples at repertory theaters everywhere.It remains possible that the same destiny will befall “Digger.” I watched the film on Saturday night to a packed (although relatively small) audience and it was interesting to note that only one or two people laughed, belying its apparent status as a dark comedy. It is somehow a mark of the picture that I was frequently unable to tell if it was the Dolby 7.1 sound system that was projecting loud noises of flatulence into the auditorium as part of the film, or if that was simply one of my fellow patrons delivering a verdict on the evening’s entertainment.Whatever the case, it seems unlikely that Mr. Cruise, its star and producer, will disown the picture. He posted on social media that “I am so honored to have had the opportunity to create this film alongside such talented artists…the experience was truly unforgettable and I’m so proud of what we created.” One can only salute his indefatigability and typically Tom Cruise-like refusal to be downhearted at the film’s flop. But just as “Digger” ends with a neatly drawn and frustratingly brief evocation of a dystopian futuristic world, it looks increasingly as if, with Warners being absorbed into Paramount, that strange, unique pictures such as this — love it, loathe it or baffle at it — will no longer be part of the Hollywood landscape. Whatever else you make of this notorious picture’s strengths and weaknesses, that has to be a loss.

The Misfiring Marketing Campaign for Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’

The Misfiring Marketing Campaign for Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’

More from the New York Sun

A Star Who Deserves To Be Reborn

Kidnapping Investigation Leads to Arrest of Germany’s Former Spy Chief on Treasonous Espionage Charges

$1 Billion Swing: PGA Tour Lobbies Trump to Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Saudi Forces Win Back Control of Key Red Sea Port After Rapid Advance Left Houthis Overextended

Inside El-Sayed’s Glitzy New York Fundraiser, AOC, Democrats Whoop It Up, Prepare To ‘Break the Map’

Putin Seeks To Make Ukrainians Freeze in the Dark This Winter

Trump Cancels Taxpayer-Funded Midterm Hype Ads Focused on Himself

Hundreds of Anti-Israel Protests Target Third Anniversary of October 7

More from the New York Sun

A Star Who Deserves To Be Reborn

Kidnapping Investigation Leads to Arrest of Germany’s Former Spy Chief on Treasonous Espionage Charges

$1 Billion Swing: PGA Tour Lobbies Trump to Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Saudi Forces Win Back Control of Key Red Sea Port After Rapid Advance Left Houthis Overextended

Inside El-Sayed’s Glitzy New York Fundraiser, AOC, Democrats Whoop It Up, Prepare To ‘Break the Map’

Putin Seeks To Make Ukrainians Freeze in the Dark This Winter

Trump Cancels Taxpayer-Funded Midterm Hype Ads Focused on Himself

Hundreds of Anti-Israel Protests Target Third Anniversary of October 7