It’s been a minute since any studio has dealt with such a massive bomb like Digger. Yes, there have been box-office bombs in recent years, but none of them came with Tom Cruise and what he hoped would be an awards-season full of lead-actor nominations. It’s truly crazy how that we went from “Digger might get Tom Cruise another Oscar nomination” to “Digger is the biggest critical and financial disaster in YEARS,” and it all happened in a matter of days. As I said yesterday, it’s now clear that Digger should have been made as an art-house film with a small budget, but because Cruise and Alejandro Iñárritu were attached, suddenly they were working with a $180 million budget and no one was saying “no” to anyone. Well, the blame game continues, as does the haphazard crisis management around Digger. The Hollywood Reporter points out that Warner Bros is trying hard to get international audiences to embrace this disaster:

Warner Bros. rolled out a new ad for Digger that is trying yet another approach to market the tough-to-sell Alejandro G. Iñárritu film, which just debuted to the lowest opening weekend box office for a movie starring Tom Cruise in 19 years.

The online ad shows a series of glowing quotes from critics from various countries and contrasts them with negative reviews from U.S. critics. The sort-of implication: The rest of the world loves this movie — it’s just dumb Americans who fail to appreciate its genius. At the start of the ad, Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell says, “America has stood beside the world in its darkest of hours,” to which Riz Ahmed’s character shoots back, “Not anymore.”

Then comes the succession of critic quotes alongside a flag representing the critic’s country. The first is from a Mexican YouTuber who called the film “Epic, Extraordinary and Biting,” followed by a Playlist quote, along with an American flag, which called the film “Grotesque, Deliberately Tacky.” Later, there’s a French critic who calls Digger “A Gem of Intelligence,” followed by The New York Post calling it “An Unintentionally Bad Movie.” The ad concludes with Cruise’s character declaring, “You decide which!”

Digger is expected to gross only around $8 million at the domestic weekend box office, which is even lower than the studio’s meager $12-$15 million prediction, and certainly leagues lower than the film’s $125 million projected budget.

Is it actually true, however, that the international press likes Digger more than the American press? There may be a little truth to this. While Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 50 percent positive, French aggregation site AlloCiné currently gives the film an average press rating of 3.2 out of 5 across 30 reviews. The two metrics aren’t directly comparable, but the French score suggests a somewhat warmer critical reception. Several top critics in Britain and Australia were notably warm towards the film, though both countries, certainly, had dissenters as well.

[From THR]

They’re trying to “Jerry Lewis” Tom Cruise, you guys. Tom Cruise: famously NOT embraced by American audiences, so he has to seek fame and fortune in Europe! While THR tries to put a bow on this strategy, Variety pointed out something interesting, namely that the international release won’t help. Per Variety, “Foreign audiences were supposed to be the saving grace after domestic projections began to nosedive in the days leading up to release. Cruise’s movies usually make the majority of their money at the international box office anyway…It turns out, that wasn’t totally true. The movie was equally rejected overseas with a paltry $12 million from 73 markets. Ouch.”

Variety also points to Cruise’s promotional strategy as one of the reasons why Digger flopped so hard. That’s one area where I’ll put up an argument: I was surprised by Tom’s promotion and how eager he was to go out and sell Digger like he’s an up-and-coming actor. He stopped by Graham Norton’s show, Jennifer Hudson’s show, he appeared on GQ and gave them an in-depth interview, he did some of those cutesy internet videos, and on and on. He hustled pretty hard, harder than he has in years. It just didn’t make a difference because the movie is bad.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images and screencaps from ‘Digger’ trailer.