***Minor SPOILERS for Digger below.

Generally speaking, Tom Cruise is not a sympathetic figure to most people. He’s insanely wealthy, he’s a powerful member of a dangerous cult, he completely disassociated himself from his youngest child for no real reason. But I actually have a small pang of sympathy for Cruise right now because of Digger. Digger is one of the biggest box office bombs of the year (perhaps of the decade) and it’s on track to lose $200 million, easily. Not only that, but the critics just despise Digger, and this role was supposed to be Tom’s big awards-bait showcase. Now Tom has nothing – a catastrophic financial failure, a critical flop, and the film won’t even have any cult status. Well, Tom is doing the only thing he really can at this point: talk about how he’s proud of his dumb flop, regardless of what everyone says, and that he made something which will be around for a while (it will not).

Tom Cruise suffered one of his worst box office openings in history with “Digger,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s satirical black comedy that bombed with $8 million in North America on a production budget north of $160 million. But Cruise isn’t one to judge a movie based on its first weekend in theaters.

“When I am making [movies], I’m not going, ‘Opening weekend!’ I feel very much like we’re going to make something that is a lasting piece of cinema,” Cruise said in a now-viral interview on the “On Film With Kevin McCarthy” podcast that was published the same day “Digger” opened in theaters.

Cruise and Iñárritu recalled Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” as a movie that was a “masterpiece” that “everybody killed” when it opened in theaters. It later emerged as one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made.

“They transcend… you just hope you can make a film that can last,” Cruise said. “So many things happen when you open a movie. I was fortunate to release movies in the ’80s and ’90s, when movies would stay in the theater for a year. With ‘Rain Man’ and ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ these movie would just play and play for a year. How can I make a film that can translate and last and evolve? And I feel that way…. that is ‘Digger,’ it’s one of those movies.”

With its production budget between $160 million and $180 million, plus a $100 million marketing budget, “Digger” would need to gross $350 million in theaters worldwide just to break even at the box office. That figure will be impossible to hit after the movie’s $20 million global start. The movie is now primed to lose at least $150 million to $200 million theatrically.

[From Variety]

While I wasn’t around for Blade Runner, I think Blade Runner was more easily identifiable as bold and visionary, something ahead of its time which simply didn’t land with an audience when it was first released. Absolutely no one is calling Digger bold and visionary… because it isn’t. The big twist is a plot device recently seen in a Wes Anderson movie!! Like, justice for Wes Anderson – he makes his weird and sweet little movies with small budgets, and no one bugs him. And no, Digger is not going to be one of those slow-burn movies which will eventually find its audience or become a word-of-mouth hit. Please.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, screencaps & poster courtesy of Warner Bros/Digger trailer.