Hollywood spends half its time complaining about sequel fatigue, cinematic universes, legacy characters, and intellectual property being microwaved for the eighth time. Then somebody actually hands Tom Cruise $170 million to play a grotesque oil baron in an Alejandro G. Iñárritu climate satire, and suddenly everyone gathers around the box-office numbers like vultures at a buffet.

Digger has plenty of bruises, including disastrous reviews, a dreadful opening, and a projected $250 million loss. Yet Ben Affleck thinks the glee surrounding its collapse has crossed into something uglier.

To him, watching Hollywood celebrate an ambitious movie falling flat feels suspiciously like being back in the school cafeteria.

During his appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Ben Affleck reflected on the periods of his own career when public criticism stopped feeling connected to the actual work. That conversation quickly led him to Digger.

“It’s a little bit like the high school bullying thing,” Affleck said before pointing toward the attention surrounding the film’s box-office collapse.

He argued that people seemed unusually excited about watching the movie fail, even though it came from filmmakers attempting something genuinely ambitious. The numbers certainly provide plenty of ammunition. Digger opened with $8 million domestically and $21 million worldwide, while its production cost exceeded $170 million.  

Warner Bros. could ultimately lose around $250 million even after post-theatrical revenue enters the equation. Affleck’s point concerns what happens after those numbers hit social media. He warned that relentlessly punishing creative risks eventually encourages studios to sand every strange edge away.

“You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing,” he argued.

That does not magically turn Digger into a misunderstood masterpiece. It does underline the contradiction in demanding original studio movies while treating every expensive miss like a public execution with popcorn.

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And Digger certainly took a swing, because its strangest creative decision arrives when the movie effectively pulls the floor out from underneath itself.

For roughly its first 30 minutes, Digger appears to be exactly the apocalypse satire advertised. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a fossil-fuel titan whose greed helps trigger a global environmental catastrophe. Governments panic, disaster spreads, and the billionaire is tasked with helping clean up the mess he helped create.

Then a tree falls over. A stagehand calmly puts it back. Suddenly, the movie reveals that Digger Rockwell is fictional even within Digger. Cruise is actually playing Curtis Markson, an actor starring as Rockwell in a theatrical production about a catastrophe that happened roughly 30 years earlier in the film’s timeline. 

It is a wonderfully bonkers idea on paper. The trouble arrives once the curtain keeps opening. For some viewers, that Brechtian trick is the entire meal. For others, it is the moment the emotional engine falls out of the car while Cruise is still enthusiastically pressing the accelerator. Audiences were allowed to hate it. Affleck simply thinks celebrating the corpse sends Hollywood a dangerous message.

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What do you think about Ben Affleck defending Digger from the box-office pile-on? Does Hollywood punish ambitious failures too aggressively? Let us know in the comments.