When a movie fails as spectacularly as Digger has—Tom Cruise's passion project about a Depression-era miner that has become October's most reliable punchline—the pile-on becomes its own entertainment. Social media delights in the schadenfreude, critics sharpen their knives for a second pass, and the discourse settles into comfortable mockery. Ben Affleck would like everyone to consider what happens next.
In comments that surfaced this week, Affleck argued that the public bullying of Digger will have consequences beyond one film's ignominious run. Studios, he suggested, will draw exactly the lesson you'd expect: don't greenlight movies that take risks. The result will be more "s—ty homogenized movies," more sequels to sequels, more IP strip-mining. Affleck isn't asking audiences to pretend Digger is good. He's asking them to consider whether the pleasure of ridicule is worth the cost.
The economics of embarrassment
Affleck's argument has a certain structural logic. Studios are not artistic institutions; they are risk-management operations that happen to produce art. When a swing-for-the-fences original like Digger becomes not merely a financial disappointment but a cultural humiliation, the lesson absorbed in boardrooms is not "we should have made it better" but "we should not have made it at all." The difference between a quiet failure and a meme-ified disaster is the difference between a write-off and a cautionary tale that echoes through development meetings for years.
This is not hypothetical. The spectacular public failures of the early 2020s—from Babylon to Amsterdam—preceded a period of intensified franchise dependence. Studios learned that original films carry asymmetric risk: succeed and you get modest credit; fail and you become a case study in executive incompetence.
The limits of the argument
There is, of course, a counterpoint. Audiences are not obligated to perform enthusiasm for films that don't work, and the suggestion that mockery constitutes a kind of cultural vandalism can feel like celebrity special pleading. Digger is not failing because people are mean on the internet; it's failing because, by most accounts, it is a ponderous, self-serious film that mistakes ambition for achievement. The pile-on is a symptom, not a cause.
Moreover, Affleck's framing elides the question of which risks deserve protection. Hollywood takes plenty of creative risks—they just tend to involve established stars and directors with enough leverage to demand them. The truly marginal projects, the ones from unknown filmmakers with no safety net, rarely get the benefit of A-list defenses when they stumble.
The Cruise factor
It's worth noting that Digger exists because Tom Cruise wanted it to exist. Cruise remains one of the few actors who can will a $120 million original into production through sheer force of stardom. That power is valuable, and its preservation arguably benefits the broader ecosystem. But Cruise's track record also includes Top Gun: Maverick, which proved that original-ish spectacle can still dominate. The lesson of Digger may be less about audience cruelty than about the limits of star capital when the material doesn't connect.
Our take
Affleck is performing a useful service by articulating the feedback loop between audience behavior and studio decision-making, even if his framing is self-serving. The uncomfortable truth is that cultural discourse does shape what gets made, and the gleeful destruction of ambitious failures has downstream effects. But the solution isn't audience restraint—it's a studio system less pathologically responsive to short-term sentiment. Until that changes, Affleck's warning will remain accurate and largely unheeded.
