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Warner Bros. appears to have deleted an ad for Tom Cruise’s new film, Digger, that juxtaposed negative reviews from American critics against glowing reviews from the rest of the world.
The black comedy, starring Cruise as a powerful oil tycoon bracing for an environmental disaster, bombed at the box office over the weekend, earning a dismal $8 million domestically against an estimated $180 million budget.
A since-deleted online ad seen by The Independent appeared to suggest that American critics failed to appreciate the movie — directed by The Revenant filmmaker Alejandro Iñárritu — while those abroad did.
The ad showed Cruise as Digger Rockwell saying, “America has stood beside the world in its darkest of hours,” to which Riz Ahmed’s character replies, “Not anymore.”
It then cuts to a series of review excerpts, each accompanied by a flag indicating the critic’s nationality.
The first, from a Mexican YouTuber, describes the film as “Epic, Extraordinary and Biting,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. It is followed by a Playlist review, accompanied by an American flag, calling Digger “Grotesque, Deliberately Tacky.”
A French critic describes the film as “A Gem of Intelligence,” before an American review from the New York Post calls it “An Unintentionally Bad Movie.”
The ad ends with Cruise’s character declaring: “You decide which!”
The Independent has contacted Warner Bros. for comment.
As of Monday, the ad is no longer available on X; however, a number of fans responded in shock before it was taken down.
“Insane banger from WB to advertise Digger with the caveat ‘Americans are stupid and have assessed it incorrectly, look at these reviews from other countries,’” wrote one person on X
“Holy s*** they’re straight up calling out americans for being the only people who didn’t like the movie,” added another.
“They’re saying Americans are too dumb for DIGGER. Prove the Europeans wrong and go to the movies. It’s your patriotic duty,” wrote a third.
Another ad shared from the official Digger account Saturday remains online with a similar message. It opens with Cruise’s character looking at the film’s unappealing 51 percent score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Two negative reviews are then shown on-screen before it cuts back to Digger saying, “You know what, f*** those people,” in the film.
“You decide,” the tweet was captioned.
The Independent was not among the international publications that looked upon Digger more favorably than its U.S. counterparts.
In her two-star review, critic Clarisse Loughrey writes that Iñárritu has been “(somewhat unfairly) maligned in the past because of how easily bravado can read as arrogance. Yet, in that respect, Digger is both his most ambitious work yet and one that arrives, in all its American grotesquerie, with the all the force of a light breeze. It’s simply not mean enough to mean enough.”
Of the film’s star, she adds: “As much as Digger has been sold on the promise that Cruise here is a revelation, there’s no real inversion to speak of, merely a return to the kind of work he did (over two decades ago!) before his blockbuster action streak. Even his latex makeover seems reminiscent of his paunchy, balding Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder (2008). He’s dependably formidable. And magnetic. He delivers dialogue like he’s setting up a sniper shot. His blustering centrepiece is a speech delivered to the people about how their own attachment to convenience has made them complicit.”
Meanwhile, in an early reaction to the film, The Independent’s Jacob Stolworthy said that Digger took a “big swing that grabbed my attention in a big way.”
“Digger is the kind of film that exists entirely on its own merits, and almost dares the audience to dislike it,” he said.
Digger is out now in theaters.
