Hollywood Spends $280 Million Explaining Capitalism Is Evil in Digger, Discovers Customers Can Refuse to Buy
Tom Cruise's Digger reportedly needed hundreds of millions in ticket sales to deliver its warning about money, greed and powerful corporations, but American consumers maliciously introduced Hollywood to supply and demand
Digger Box Office: Hollywood's $280 Million Bet on a Movie Suspicious of Capitalism
Hollywood reportedly spent as much as $280 million producing and marketing a movie suspicious of capitalism, apparently hoping capitalism would reimburse them by Tuesday.
LOS ANGELES — Hollywood has suffered another devastating encounter with ordinary Americans after moviegoers used the sinister right-wing economic mechanism known as “choosing what to buy” and declined to purchase enough tickets to Digger, the enormously expensive Tom Cruise climate satire about wealth, power, corporate greed and environmental catastrophe.
The situation has stunned Hollywood, where executives had apparently believed capitalism consisted primarily of rich people behaving badly in screenplays rather than millions of individuals deciding whether something was worth twelve bucks and parking.
The numbers are magnificent. Not magnificent for Warner Bros., obviously. Magnificent for satire.
Digger opened to roughly $8 million domestically and $20 million worldwide, according to entertainment-industry reporting. Its production budget reportedly climbed to somewhere around $160 million to $180 million, a figure Warner Bros. disputes, with another estimated $100 million spent marketing it. Industry estimates cited by Variety put the theatrical break-even point somewhere around $300 million to $350 million.
This creates what economists call “the funniest possible balance sheet.” The studio spent perhaps $260 million to $280 million producing and advertising a cautionary tale about capitalism, corporate irresponsibility and powerful rich men, then needed hundreds of millions of dollars from consumers in the international capitalist marketplace to get it back.
Consumers declined. Hollywood is reportedly examining whether this constitutes voter suppression.
I'm Thinking Hollywood Must HATE Capitalisms
- Hollywood reportedly spent as much as $280 million producing and marketing a movie suspicious of capitalism, apparently hoping capitalism would reimburse them by Tuesday.
- The movie reportedly needed around $300–350 million worldwide to break even, meaning the filmmakers required an enormous amount of corporate profit to demonstrate the moral hazards of corporate profit.
- Audiences answered Hollywood's critique of capitalism by exercising consumer choice, which was frankly insensitive.
- Digger attacks powerful rich people while starring one of the world's biggest movie stars and carrying a production budget larger than the GDP of several imaginary republics.
- The movie's giant twist reveals that much of what we're watching is actually a theatrical production called Fossil Fools, because apparently one lecture wasn't sufficiently recursive.
Digger Box Office Flop: Capitalism Behaves Inappropriately During an Anti-Capitalist Movie
The problem with markets is that eventually somebody starts shopping. Hollywood enjoys capitalism considerably more when it happens during the financing stage.
“Would you like $180 million to make your vision?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like another $100 million to tell everyone about your vision?”
“Absolutely.”
“Excellent. Now customers decide whether they want it.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Nobody mentioned extremism.”
That final step remains troublesome. The modern entertainment industry seems fascinated by the idea that audiences should regard buying a ticket not as purchasing entertainment but as completing a citizenship requirement. You aren't seeing a movie. You're participating in the conversation.
Unfortunately, millions of Americans have discovered another way to participate in the conversation. They stay home. Sometimes they make nachos. This has devastated several graduate students at UCLA.
Why Audiences Skipped Digger: $18 Popcorn Is Not a Compulsory Donation
The basic economics are remarkably simple. When people look at a movie and think, “That sounds entertaining,” they may buy tickets. When they look at a movie and think, “That sounds like a two-hour political seminar where I also have to pay for parking,” they may instead visit Costco.
Hollywood's response has frequently been to conclude that Costco shoppers require additional education. This is known as the Progressive Entertainment Paradox: if audiences enjoy your movie, you have successfully changed society, and if they don't, society has failed your movie. Either way, the movie remains blameless.
A wholly unscientific survey conducted outside a suburban multiplex found that 94 percent of respondents preferred “a good story” to “being morally improved by people with houses in Malibu.” The remaining six percent worked in development.
Fossil Fools: The Digger Twist Needed a Lecture Inside the Lecture
Digger begins with Cruise playing a fantastically wealthy oil baron confronting an environmental catastrophe. Then comes the enormous meta twist: the audience discovers that what they've been watching is itself a theatrical production inside the movie.
The production is called Fossil Fools.
Yes. Fossil Fools. Hollywood paid considerably more than the annual municipal budgets of many American towns and arrived at the title Fossil Fools. This is what happens when nobody in a conference room feels financially secure enough to say, “Are we sure?”
The twist converts the film into commentary about performance, grief, catastrophe and the purpose of satire. So the audience isn't merely watching a political allegory. It's watching actors portraying actors performing a political allegory about whether political allegories accomplish anything. This is technically known as putting another lectern inside the lectern, the cinematic equivalent of discovering halfway through a TED Talk that the TED Talk is part of a larger TED Talk examining why you dislike TED Talks.
Digger Marketing Campaign Reportedly Flew Influencers Around for a Climate Satire
Then we come to the promotional campaign. According to The Daily Beast, the roughly $100 million marketing effort included flying influencers in from around the world to watch a trailer. For an environmental satire. You really cannot improve that sentence.
Somewhere in Greenland, a glacier presumably paused long enough to whisper, “Guys?”
Hollywood has reached a fascinating stage of environmentalism where ordinary people are encouraged to consider the carbon footprint of driving a Ford F-150 to work, while entertainment companies can put internet celebrities on aircraft so they can watch two minutes of Tom Cruise footage. That isn't hypocrisy. It's premium sustainability. The carbon emissions presumably become morally biodegradable once everyone receives a lanyard.
Wealth Is Terrible, Please Give Us $350 Million: The Digger Budget Problem
The movie reportedly explores familiar ideas about powerful elites, environmental negligence, corruption and greed. All perfectly legitimate subjects for satire. But satire generally benefits from something historically referred to as being funny. Otherwise you've made a sermon with a costume department.
The most delicious contradiction is economic. A giant corporation funds a gigantic movie starring gigantic celebrities to complain about gigantic concentrations of wealth while desperately needing gigantic revenue.
“Wealth corrupts!”
“How much money does the movie need?”
“Three hundred fifty million.”
“That's quite a lot of wealth.”
“Corporate wealth is different.”
“How?”
“Ours has an awards consultant.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with criticizing capitalism while participating in capitalism. You can criticize restaurants while eating dinner. You can criticize automobiles while driving. You can criticize your dentist while still wanting teeth. But if your $180 million production complains that society is obsessed with money, you should probably expect somebody in Omaha to notice the irony.
Tom Cruise Wasn't the Problem With Digger
Cruise, importantly, appears to have committed fully to the project, which may make the situation funnier. Here is one of the few movie stars left who can reliably convince people to watch him hang from airplanes, jump motorcycles off mountains and perform stunts that make insurance executives spontaneously develop religion.
Hollywood had Tom Cruise. Hollywood had a two-time Best Director Oscar winner in Alejandro González Iñárritu. Hollywood had Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and a formidable cast. Hollywood had hundreds of millions of dollars.
Then somebody apparently said, “Great. Now let's make sure the audience understands how terrible rich powerful people are.”
The result was Cruise's lowest opening in 19 years. There comes a point where you aren't losing customers because the marketing department failed. You're losing them because they saw the marketing.
Hollywood's New Genre: Important
Hollywood traditionally produced a handful of genres: comedy, drama, action, romance, horror, western, science fiction. Now there is another category.
Important.
An Important Movie arrives carrying tremendous expectations. The actors explain that the screenplay changed them. The director says we must begin a conversation. Entertainment journalists call the project “urgent.” Somebody at a festival uses the phrase “holding space.” The audience begins backing slowly toward the exit.
The problem isn't politics. Political films can be brilliant. The problem is self-importance. The second a movie starts acting like buying a ticket makes you morally superior to your neighbor, the popcorn develops a counterargument. Audiences can smell homework.
Digger CinemaScore: Hollywood Earns a C+
Variety reported that audiences gave Digger a CinemaScore of C+.
A C+ is a beautiful grade. It isn't failure, exactly. It's what institutional politeness looks like. A C+ says, “You showed up. You used paragraphs. Several nouns were correctly spelled. We would prefer not to discuss the conclusion.”
Hollywood should understand the C+ because the entertainment industry practically invented grade inflation. When a $180 million movie receives one, somebody immediately starts explaining how audiences weren't ready. Perhaps. But sometimes audiences are completely ready. They're ready to see something else, and that's the part Hollywood finds spiritually troubling.
The Free Market Has Spoken, Hollywood Requests a Recount
This weekend delivered a magnificent lesson in free markets. Nobody banned Digger, censored it or stood outside theaters shouting, “You cannot see this environmental satire!” The movie received thousands of screens. A colossal promotional campaign supported it. Tom Cruise's face was available in industrial quantities.
Then individuals made individual decisions, and Anne Hathaway's Verity took the weekend with about $32 million.
That is capitalism operating with almost offensively good manners. No committee. No mandate. No five-year cinema plan. No Ministry of Appropriate Entertainment. Just millions of people independently saying:
“Nah.”
Hollywood can tolerate almost any ideology except “Nah.” “Nah” cannot be reasoned with. “Nah” has no spokesman, doesn't attend panels and cannot be cancelled. “Nah” simply keeps its wallet in its trousers.
The Real Twist: Digger as a Free-Market Parable
Perhaps Digger accidentally produced the year's finest capitalist parable. A group of extraordinarily talented people gathered enormous quantities of capital. They created a product, advertised it and offered it to consumers. Consumers evaluated the proposition, and most apparently decided against buying it. Information traveled back through prices and ticket sales, and resources will presumably be allocated differently next time.
Friedrich Hayek couldn't have storyboarded it better.
And somewhere in Hollywood, an executive is probably staring at a spreadsheet asking the eternal question: “How do we get Americans interested in our criticism of consumer capitalism?”
An assistant quietly raises her hand.
“Could we make something they want to consume?”
Security removes her from the building.
Hollywood Announces Solution: More Hollywood
Sources close to absolutely nobody say the industry's response is already under consideration. The next environmental satire will cost $400 million. It will contain four levels of plays-within-movies. Influencers will be flown individually on separate aircraft to watch the poster being designed. Every ticket will include a 37-page discussion guide. The villain will own an oil company, a private jet, six SUVs and one suspiciously large barbecue grill.
Halfway through, audiences will discover the villain is actually an actor playing an actor who is dreaming about another actor performing an interpretive dance representing ExxonMobil. Critics will call it “fearless.” Audiences will watch Die Hard again. And Hollywood will remain puzzled.
Because the industry's greatest blind spot isn't left, right, Republican, Democrat, capitalist or socialist. It's simpler. People frequently go to the movies because they want to have a good time. That's it. There's no doctoral dissertation hiding under the seat.
They've worked all week. They've paid the mortgage, bought the groceries, sat in traffic and answered fourteen emails marked “quick question.” Now they want Tom Cruise to do something entertaining. If he saves the world, terrific. If he destroys the world, interesting. If he jumps from an airplane, even better.
But if he spends two hours helping Hollywood explain why the audience's economic system has disappointed Hollywood, the customer may exercise the ultimate revolutionary act. He buys a ticket to something else.
And that, comrades, is the twist Hollywood never sees coming.
10 Humorous Observations About the Digger Box Office Bomb
- Hollywood has progressed from movies with messages to messages occasionally interrupted by movies.
- The title is Digger, and financially it immediately began digging. At least somebody respected the screenplay.
- Variety reported a C+ CinemaScore, suggesting audiences thought the movie deserved credit for remembering to put its name on the test.
- The marketing campaign reportedly flew influencers around the world to watch a trailer for an environmental satire. Somewhere a polar bear has requested the carbon accounting spreadsheet.
- Hollywood increasingly treats “important” as a genre, right between comedy and horror.
- The industry spent decades learning that audiences hate being lectured, then concluded the obvious solution was better cinematography during the lecture.
- A regular person losing $150 would cancel Netflix. Hollywood potentially loses $150 million and schedules an awards campaign.
- The movie suggests satire may merely distract people from serious problems, then charges admission to demonstrate the theory.
- Hollywood executives apparently believe ordinary Americans dislike political sermons because they haven't yet experienced one involving enough prosthetics.
- Capitalism received terrible reviews in Digger but won the weekend anyway.
Disclaimer
This is satirical journalism built around publicly reported box-office figures, reviews and plot details concerning Digger. The jokes, mock surveys, imagined executive conversations and alleged reactions from glaciers should not be mistaken for sworn testimony, accounting advice or an application to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
This story is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer, neither of whom has ever required $100 million to advertise a joke.
For the reporting that inspired the piece, see the Daily Beast coverage of Digger's reviews and the Variety box-office report on its extraordinary budget and opening weekend.
IMAGE GALLERY
Digger with Tom Cruise https://prat.uk/capitalisms-and-digger-box-office/
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