Digger, Iñárritu’s human experiment

A note before you read: this article discusses all of Digger, including its twist, its ending and my own interpretation of it. If you have not seen it yet and want to, be prepared.

Digger is a satire about the end of the world by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director of Amores Perros, Birdman and The Revenant. Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate who causes a global catastrophe and then sets out to save humanity from the disaster he created. Warner Bros. says it spent $125 million to make the film; trade reports put the cost at $160 million to $180 million, plus roughly $100 million for marketing. It was one of the most anticipated and discussed releases of the fall. It also arrived with a secret: none of its trailers revealed what the film is really about. Two weeks after it opened, Digger has sold about $41 million in tickets worldwide, and cinemas are already dropping it.

I think Digger is one of the most revealing human experiments of recent times. Nobody designed its release as an experiment, but I find it useful to read it as one. Its hypothesis, as I reconstruct it from Iñárritu’s own words, was simple and daring: sell the film without revealing what it is, bring people into cinemas, and once they are seated, surprise them with a film about themselves. The secret was not an accident of marketing; it was the method of the experiment. Warner Bros. bet on it and let Iñárritu run it on his terms, with Tom Cruise in the lead and a release around the world. Then the public answered, the same way everywhere. People stayed home. The hypothesis failed, and there is much to learn from the way it did.

The most important outcome is not that a film flopped; films flop every year. It is that one of the most respected artists in cinema and one of the largest studios in the world, with every resource available, both misread how ordinary people would respond.

My explanation is that Digger lived in two worlds that decide whether to see a film in completely different ways. One is the conversation: a small, influential elite of critics, filmmakers, Iñárritu’s own circle, awards watchers and the people who argue about films on social media. They decide after reading, debating and taking sides. The other is the public: the average person who has never read a review of Digger and decides in a few seconds, from a trailer and a familiar face, whether a film is worth an evening out. For two months the conversation discussed Digger without pause. The public never came.

I also want to read Digger the way Iñárritu asks us to read the world. His film tells its audience to stop watching the stage and look at the people in the seats. I apply that same lens to the film itself: how Digger was conceived, sold and argued about, what people finally did, and what that says about us.

A film about watching the end of the world

Digger began as a project at Netflix, which passed on it because it seemed too close to Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s 2021 satire about humanity ignoring a comet headed for Earth. Warner Bros. and Legendary, the production company behind Dune, took it on. Iñárritu filmed it in England over six months with Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer who won three consecutive Oscars, two of them for Birdman and The Revenant.

Iñárritu has said that the satire he set out to write became something closer to a documentary about the future, and that reality itself has become a spectacle. Digger is his attempt to put that idea on screen: a film about how we watch disasters, from a seat, at a safe distance, as entertainment.

The plot follows Digger Rockwell as he drills in Greenland against every warning and sets off a catastrophe. About a third of the way in, the film changes its nature. A prop fails, and we discover we have been watching a stage play: Digger is a character, played by an actor, in a theatrical production about a disaster that has already happened. That twist is the heart of the film.

The ending shows what the twist is for. Inside the play, Digger, stranded and abandoned, throws himself into a poisoned sea, and the theater audience bursts into cheers and applause. An air-quality alarm then cuts it short. The spectators put on breathing masks made by the Rockwell family company and walk out into a flooded Manhattan patrolled by soldiers and drones, in a single unbroken shot. Their world is in ruins, yet they bought tickets to laugh at the man who ruined it and to celebrate his death. The catastrophe has become a show they enjoy.

What did Iñárritu intend with this ending? The audience in the final scene is his portrait of us: people who will turn even the end of the world into entertainment, as long as the guilt belongs to someone on stage. He expected the real audience to behave the same way, and meant to turn that habit against it.

Two bets were in play from the start: a studio willing to fund an expensive satire another studio had passed on and sell it without revealing what it was, and a director convinced that people, once seated, would recognize themselves in it.

The studio’s bet: money will bring an audience

Warner Bros. followed a formula that has worked for decades: put the biggest star in the world in a film by a director with back-to-back Oscars, spend enough that everyone knows about it, and the audience will come. In April, the studio presented Digger at CinemaCon, the annual convention where studios pitch their coming films to theater owners, with Cruise and Iñárritu on stage. It booked the film into IMAX and more than 3,300 theaters across North America, and released it in 73 international markets in the same week.

The bet also rested on awards hopes. Among people who follow the awards season, Digger was a contender before anyone had seen it: Iñárritu’s record put the film in the race, and after the CinemaCon footage the trade press asked whether Cruise would finally win an acting Oscar. He has three nominations and received an honorary Oscar in 2025, but has never won one in competition. For Digger, the star of Top Gun and Mission: Impossible disappeared under prosthetics created by a team led by Kazu Hiro, the makeup artist who won Oscars for Darkest Hour and Bombshell, to play a balding, heavy, aging Texas oilman. The trailers showcased that transformation and never revealed that the film is a play.

The director’s bet: people will see themselves

Iñárritu’s bet was bolder, and it depended entirely on the secret. A film about climate change, billionaires and the politicians who serve them could fill seats if people expected to laugh at the powerful. Digger would be sold that way, as a Tom Cruise satire, a comedy of catastrophic proportions, with the play and its real subject hidden. The discovery that it was about the audience had to wait until people were inside, and was meant to send them home reflecting on their own part in the disaster. I believe he persuaded Warner Bros. to market the film on those terms.

He has said that he wanted audiences to be surprised by what the film turns out to be, that a film only reveals itself in front of a real audience, and that he prefers a divided reaction to a lukewarm one. The ending of Digger was more than the last scene of its plot: it was a prediction about the people in the seats, and the release would test it.

The conversation: two months of noise

I followed the conversation from the start, and it turned at the world premiere on September 22. The premiere was the Royal Film Performance in London’s Leicester Square, an annual charity event attended this year by the Prince and Princess of Wales. Reviews were still under embargo, but people who had seen the film shared their reactions on social media, and they were harsh. I was surprised, and so was much of the film world: the mood around Digger shifted overnight, and the next day reports said advance ticket sales were slipping.

When the embargo lifted a week later, the critics split almost exactly in half. Odie Henderson, the Boston Globe’s film critic, gave Digger zero stars and called it the worst film of Cruise’s career, while Robbie Collin, the chief film critic of the Telegraph, described it as a Dr. Strangelove for the climate crisis.

Filmmakers joined in, and their voices carried weight. Guillermo del Toro, the Oscar-winning Mexican director of The Shape of Water and a longtime friend of Iñárritu, defended it as bold and daring. Hideo Kojima, the Japanese creator of the Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding video games, one of the most respected figures in gaming and a close friend of del Toro, called it excellent after sitting down with Iñárritu in Japan.

I was part of that conversation too. Reading the early reactions, my first thought was that Digger would be another Bardo, Iñárritu’s 2022 film and the one of his I like least. As a Mexican, I connect with Bardo’s themes: our experience of living next to the United States, and what it means to succeed. But the film was too strange for me, with too much going on, and I expected Digger to be the same kind of ambitious misfire.

Warner Bros. entered the debate too, with ads that set praise from French and Mexican critics against American pans, as if the film had been misunderstood only in the United States. By release day, the film had been debated, defended, mocked and analyzed for weeks. Within the conversation, Iñárritu got exactly the divided, passionate response he had said he wanted.

The verdict: people never showed up

Digger opened on October 2, and the public delivered its verdict. The film earned about $8 million in North America on its opening weekend, the weakest start for a Cruise-led film since Lions for Lambs in 2007. Ticket sales fell by 60 percent in the second weekend, and going into the third, theaters dropped it from roughly 2,500 screens. Audiences abroad stayed away too: international ticket sales total about $24.5 million. In France, where critics were warmest, the opening week drew fewer moviegoers than Birdman’s did, and in Mexico, Iñárritu’s home country, the film has earned less than $2 million. The worldwide total after two weeks is about $41 million, and the trade publication Variety projects a theatrical loss of around $245 million; Warner Bros. puts its break-even point near $300 million.

Reported cost to make and market it, by studio and trade estimates

$225–280M

Opening weekend in the US and Canada

$8M

Worldwide ticket sales after two weeks

$41M

Screens dropped going into week three

~2,500

Both bets failed at once, in every market. Warner Bros. expected the names and the money to bring people in, and they did not. Iñárritu expected an audience that would come and applaud, and the public did neither. It did not even come to boo. It simply stayed home.

Nor did the noise help. None of what the conversation produced, from the premiere reactions and the reviews to the defenses and the ads, persuaded the public to buy a ticket. The studio and the director had both read the room, I think, but it was the wrong room.

Why both bets misread the public

I see several reasons: the distance between the two worlds, the way the public decides, other forces working against the film, what two other films suggest and, for those who did know what Digger was about, the film itself.

The two worlds barely meet. Most moviegoers never read the Boston Globe’s review, never saw del Toro’s posts and do not follow Kojima. The conversation still reached them, but in its crudest form: not as arguments, but as a vague sense that the film was strange and badly received. The slip in presales the morning after the London reactions suggests how fast that signal travels.

Beyond that signal, the public decides from a trailer and a star, as surveys have shown for years. When the polling company Morning Consult asked Americans what mattered most in choosing a film, 27 percent named the trailer and 25 percent the actors; only 4 percent named professional critics. In a survey by Fandango, the American ticketing service, 93 percent of ticket buyers said trailers guide which films they pick. A classic study in the Journal of Marketing found that critics’ reviews predict a film’s overall performance more than they drive its opening weekend.

In my opinion, this is how the decision looked from the public’s side. The trailer does not reveal what the film is about. The Tom Cruise people love, the one who runs, jumps and flies through Mission: Impossible, is hidden under prosthetics. The tone is hard to read: is it a comedy, a disaster film, something stranger? Most people could not tell what was on offer, did not find it appealing and moved on.

Inside the film world, none of this was visible. The conversation around Digger behaved like a closed loop: critics answered critics, filmmakers answered critics, the studio answered both, and everyone in it mistook its intensity for public interest. A divided reception is exciting within the loop; outside, it is simply a reason to see something else.

Other forces worked against the film too. The reviews were divided, a climate satire is a hard sell, and a long film that turns into a stage play is a lot to ask for the price of a ticket. Digger also opened against the thriller Verity, which won the weekend, and many people expected a different Tom Cruise. The secret made each of these harder to overcome: without a clear idea of what the film was, people had no reason to look past them.

Two other films put the result in perspective. One is Don’t Look Up, a climate satire that confronted viewers openly and drew a huge audience on Netflix, at home and at no extra cost. Perhaps people were turning down the price of a ticket and a night out as much as the message.

The other is Birdman, my favorite Iñárritu film: an actor stages a Broadway play, filmed to look like a single unbroken take, with excellent performances throughout. To me it is intellectually satisfying and technically daring at once, a rare combination. It made about $103 million worldwide on an $18 million budget, so an audience for his kind of self-aware cinema exists.

I suspect Birdman also planted the seed for Digger, whose ending is another single unbroken shot. Having put a play at the center of one film, Iñárritu seems to have looked for a new twist: hiding the play inside the story and turning it on the audience. Birdman’s play was its promise: people knew what they were buying a ticket for. Digger’s play was its secret.

For the smaller group who did learn what Digger was about, I think the deeper answer lies in the film itself. Look again at the audience in that theater: the villain stands in the spotlight, the disaster is safely in the past, and the people in the seats are free to cheer his fall. That is relief, the comfort of watching someone else take the blame, and people will happily pay for it. The real audience was offered something different. In Iñárritu’s own words, the disaster is us, and the catastrophe he describes is not over: it is the one we are living through. Few people buy a ticket to sit in the villain’s seat, and few want to spend an evening being told that they are the problem.

Iñárritu was right about one thing: we do turn catastrophe into spectacle. He was wrong about which spectacle we choose. We applaud a villain’s fall when the guilt is his. When a film holds up a mirror instead, we look away, because the most human response to discomfort is to avoid it.

A good film that almost nobody saw

Digger is not a bad film, and that matters for the experiment. When I finally saw it, a few weeks after those early reactions from London, I was pleasantly surprised. It is a good film, and far better than Bardo. My ranking of Iñárritu’s work used to be Birdman, then Amores Perros, then The Revenant. Digger now sits right after Amores Perros, as my third favorite. Its failure cannot be explained by quality alone, which is what makes the result so telling.

What the experiment says about us

The experiment is over. Iñárritu’s hypothesis was that people could be brought into a theater without being told what the film was, and then surprised into recognizing themselves. Warner Bros. gave him the means to test it, and it failed. As I read it, the secret left most people with no reason to go, and those who learned what the film was really about decided not to sit through it.

That result says as much about the people who ran the experiment as about the audience. Warner Bros.’ investment could not buy an audience. Iñárritu’s creativity could not summon one. Two months of passionate argument could not bring the average moviegoer in. In my reading, the artist and the studio, both experts at reaching audiences, misread society in the same way: they listened to the conversation and mistook it for the public. Loud is not the same as large, and Digger has measured the distance between the two with unusual precision.

The deeper lesson is about us. Digger asks us to look past the stage at ourselves, and its critique is of human behavior: the appetites and the denial behind the problems we face today, and an entertainment culture that turns them into a show. Its release offered a rough test of how much a film, a play or any piece of entertainment can change that behavior when it confronts us directly. Most of the audience never reached the confrontation, so the test is imperfect, but its evidence suggests the answer is very little. The critique came true in a way Iñárritu did not plan: offered a show about our own part in the catastrophe, almost nobody went to see it.

Iñárritu ended his film with a crowd walking out of a theater into a ruined world. The real ending was quieter and more revealing: rows of empty seats, in a world that had found something else to watch. The film’s most important scene played out not on the screen but in the seats, and that empty theater is its truest portrait of us.

None of this diminishes what Iñárritu attempted. He had a bold hypothesis about human behavior, and a major studio put well over $200 million behind testing it in front of the world. I believe he is one of cinema’s deepest philosophers of humanity, and even he could not read how society would respond. That is not a mark against him. Nobody can predict human behavior with certainty, and the future rarely answers the way we expect. What matters is that he tried. His hypothesis failed, but the attempt left us two things worth keeping: an experiment that taught us something real about ourselves, and a film we will return to for years, to reflect on the catastrophe it describes and on the audience that chose to stay away.