UPDATE: Audiences decided, as Digger is bombing at the box office with an $8 million opening.
Warner Bros. has an answer for the critics hammering Digger: let the audience call it.
Hours after the Tom Cruise and Alejandro Gonzålez Iñårritu satire debuted at a Rotten 52% on Rotten Tomatoes, the studio posted a new spot built entirely around the split.
“Decide for yourself. DIGGER, in theaters and IMAX FRIDAY. Tickets on sale now,” reads the post from the official Warner Bros. account.
The 27-second spot racked up over 700,000 views on X within hours of going up Tuesday morning.
Same Film, Different Truth
Instead of hiding the bad reviews, Warner Bros. put them in the ad.
The spot flashes one-word reactions in pairs, one printed right side up and the other flipped upside down: “Brilliant” and “Baffling.” “Insufferable” and “Magnificent.” “Unpleasant” and “Masterpiece.”
Each word carries the X handle of the critic who wrote it. The tagline lands over a courtroom mob scene from the movie: “Same film. Different truth.”
The spot also features a longer quote calling Digger “an ambitious film sure to polarize audiences,” while another tells fans, “I have never wanted to say less about a movie in my life. Go in blind! I mean it.”
Cruise: ‘F*** Those People’
The spot also works in a line from Cruise’s Digger Rockwell himself.
“You know what? F*** those people,” Cruise says as the oil billionaire.
The ad promises a movie that is “never afraid to tell the truth, whatever that is.”
Digger opens only in theaters and IMAX this Friday, October 2.
