Amid Digger‘s box office bomb, Ben Affleck is warning that those who are celebrating the film’s poor performance could instead lead to “a bunch of shitty homogenized movies.”
During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast this Monday, the Animals actor addressed the poor performance of Tom Cruise‘s latest movie. He argued that criticizing a “big swing” movie could result in studios later opting to take a safer approach with future projects.
“It’s a little bit like the high-school bullying thing, with people who hadn’t even seen movies. 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,” Affleck said.
“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 explained. “You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing, and that means you’re going to sometimes look bad.”
In The Hollywood Reporter‘s review of Digger, chief film critic David Rooney wrote, “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. 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.”
Digger opened with $8 million domestically, totaling $12 million internationally. The film’s box office performance has sparked many conversations and led to many celebrities speaking out in support of the movie directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
Among those were Anne Hathaway, who topped Digger at the box office with Verity in their opening weekends, giving the film a perfect score. She wrote on 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.”