Ben Affleck issues warning after 'ambitious' Tom Cruise's Digger flopped at the box office
Ben Affleck issues warning after 'ambitious' Tom Cruise's Digger flopped at the box office
Connor McCroryFri, October 16, 2026 at 3:25 AM UTC
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Ben Affleck came to Tom Cruise's defense -Credit:Reach Publishing Services Limited (Reach Publishing Services Limited)
Ben Affleck is pushing back against the online celebration of the box-office failure of Tom Cruise's Digger, warning that mocking ambitious films could leave audiences with blander movies.
Affleck, who stars in the Netflix film Animals, weighed in Monday on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. He likened the reaction to schoolyard taunting and noted that much of the criticism comes from people who never saw the film. The actor and filmmaker argued that the focus on the movie's financial losses overlooks what is at stake for the industry. If studios see daring projects ridiculed, he suggested, they will retreat to safer bets.
This comes after Anne Hathaway defended 'brilliant' Tom Cruise box office flop Digger in first-ever Letterboxd review.
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"It's a little bit like the high-school bullying thing, with people who hadn't even seen movies," Affleck explained.
"You see it happening now, frankly, with Digger. Everybody wants to celebrate this bomb as if it's the most exciting thing to happen, and you think like, it's a pretty ambitious, interesting movie made by interesting people that have talent," he continued.
The actor and filmmaker argued that the focus on the movie's financial losses -Credit:Getty
"Everybody wants to count the money, what it lost or whatever. To me, I just think, like, if you punish movies that take risks, guess what you're going to get? A bunch of shitty, homogenized movies," he said.
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"You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing, and that means you're going to sometimes look bad."
Directed by Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, "Digger" is a dark satire about climate change.
It earned $8 million in North America in its debut weekend, for a worldwide total of $12 million. The weak start has fueled widespread debate in Hollywood about the film's prospects and about whether big-budget, director-driven projects can still find an audience.
Reviews have been mixed, and some have been harsh. David Rooney, chief film critic for The Hollywood Reporter, was especially critical of the film's lead performance and tone.
Reviews have been mixed, and some have been harsh -Credit:Getty
"Digger is basically what happens when you put two outsize egos together with nobody holding the reins to keep their most self-indulgent impulses in check," the critic penned.
"Piloted by a spectacularly obnoxious Tom Cruise, who evidently spent hours in the makeup chair each day to look his age, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's wannabe Dr. Strangelove is a heavy-handed cataclysm scenario built around the blunt point that any attempt to halt global warming this late in the game is pure political theater," Rooney wrote.
Affleck is not the only star to defend the film. Anne Hathaway, whose thriller Verity beat Digger at the box office when both opened the same weekend, gave Iñárritu's film a perfect score on the movie-logging site Letterboxd.
"I loved this brilliant movie. It's smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious. It's worth making the time see and decide for yourself what you make of it. For me? 10/10," Hathaway wrote.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
