Digging Your Way Out of A Bad Time: Going Into Cruise Control
Is it better to try and fail than to never try at all? If over a decade of advice from our success section is to be believed, yes.
You can say a lot of things about Tom Cruise’s Digger, but one thing you can’t say is that they didn’t try. The movie does a lot, and in the process, according to the critics (53%), fails spectacularly. Audiences rated it higher at 74%, but that’s far from unanimous. The film wraps around and around as a visually striking satire of a satire directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant). It’s not for want of talent. So will this be a sleeper cult classic? That is yet to be seen, and a call that can’t be made by anybody for the next few years. Becoming a cult classic will have to be the consolation prize it goes home with, though, because the box office take is looking grim. Current statistics estimate the film is about to lose a lot of money. Estimates put its total spend at around $350 million, and it has taken only $35 million after 2 weekends globally. That’s putting it on pace to be a spectacular bomb, maybe one of the worst ever. It’s hard to blame a post-Covid theatre scene, either. This year has delivered hit after hit: Obsession and The Backrooms continue to prove that low budget imaginative horror flicks are always going to give good returns. As if to prove it, the just-released, Jessica Chastain-led horror film Other Mommy had an extremely strong opening weekend, promising!
Digger was an incredibly difficult film to market, although I and other movie buffs were made suitably curious by its off-kilter marketing and bizarre visuals. Warner Bros leaned into the split reception of the film by putting quotes from different outlets together including “brilliant” and “baffling” and asking people to decide for themselves. You have to hand it to the marketing team, they’re making lemonade out of this lemon.
One aspect that has been given universal praise is Tom Cruise himself. One critic said Cruise acted as though he was in a good film. He gives 110% to every role. I mean, have you seen Tropic Thunder?
“You’re going, how can I make a film that hopefully will translate and last and evolve… I never thought of movies, when I’m making them, going ‘opening weekend’,” he told On Film with Kevin McCarthy.
Only five of his films have ever failed to recover their budget. Edge of Tomorrow (not a bad scifi to be honest), Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (not a bad spy action film to be honest), The Mummy, Knight and Day, and Legend from 1986 that nobody remembers.
Not a bad batting average for such a long career!