Why in the Hell Did DIGGER End Up Costing as Much as a Marvel Studios Blockbuster?

Someone at Warner Bros. looked at an R-rated black comedy from Alejandro González Iñárritu starring Tom Cruise and decided, “Yeah, let’s spend Marvel money on this thing.”

That’s a part of Digger that I can’t get over. The movie crashed into theaters with just around $8 million domestivally from 3,321 locations in North America. Overseas audiences didn’t come running to see it either. Digger pulled in another $12 million internationally for a painful $20 million worldwide opening.

Those numbers would be disappointing for plenty of movies. For Digger, they’re disastrous because of what Warner Bros. and Legendary spent making it.

There are conflicting reports on exactly how expensive the movie became. Some sources put the production cost around $160 million to $180 million after its production ran long. That’s before all the marketing costs. $180 million!

How did an original R-rated experimental black comedy movie get anywhere near that number?! I’m all for studios taking chances on original movies and giving great filmmakers money to make weird, interesting stuff. Hollywood could certainly use more of that.

But there’s a difference between taking a creative risk and spending the kind of money normally reserved for superheroes, dinosaurs and some of the biggest franchises on the planet.

Look at what $180 million buys elsewhere in Hollywood. Captain America: Brave New World cost around $180 million. That’s a Marvel Studios superhero movie built around one of the MCU’s biggest brands, loaded with action, visual effects and franchise connections.

Thunderbolts* also carried a reported $180 million production budget. Even with the Marvel name attached, that was an expensive gamble, and the film finished its theatrical run with roughly $382 million worldwide. Variety reported that it needed about $425 million globally just to break even theatrically.

Jurassic World Rebirth cost $180 million net to produce. It’s a giant dinosaur spectacle belonging to a franchise that has been packing theaters for decades. The movie opened with more than $318 million worldwide in its first five days.

Then there’s Thor: Ragnarok, another $180 million superhero spectacle. That movie ultimately made about $855 million worldwide.

That’s what makes the Digger budget so hard to understand. This isn’t Jurassic World. It isn’t Marvel. It isn’t Batman, Spider-Man or any other kind of franchise. It’s an R-rated satirical black comedy based on an original screenplay that feels like and indie film.

Yes, it has Tom Cruise, and yes, Iñárritu is an Oscar-winning filmmaker. Those are major names, but neither changes what kind of movie this is or how difficult it was always going to be to sell to a massive audience.

Warner Bros. apparently believed Cruise and Iñárritu could turn Digger into an event. The studio hoped their combined drawing power could at least produce an $18 million to $20 million domestic opening. Even that target seems really small when you’re talking about a movie that may have cost $180 million before marketing.

For comparison, Warner Bros. already learned a similar lesson with Mickey 17. Bong Joon Ho’s wildly strange R-rated sci-fi film cost $118 million to produce and another $80 million to market. After it opened to $19.1 million domestically, industry estimates suggested it needed somewhere around $275 million to $300 million worldwide to turn a theatrical profit.

Digger potentially cost more than $60 million beyond that production budget and opened to less than half as much domestically. That’s insane.

None of this means studios should stop funding original movies. I hope they keep doing it. Give talented filmmakers money. Take chances. Make strange movies. Let major stars do something besides sequels and franchise installments. Just maybe don’t spend $180 million doing it unless there’s a realistic path to getting that money back.

Once you’re spending superhero money, you need superhero-sized ticket sales, or at least something remotely close to them. An R-rated black comedy already has a smaller potential audience than a PG or PG-13 franchise movie, which makes Digger an especially strange project to carry this kind of financial weight.

The opening weekend makes the disconnect painfully clear. Digger earned only $20 million worldwide against a reported production cost that may have reached $180 million.

Maybe the bigger question isn’t why audiences didn’t show up. It’s why anyone thought a movie like Digger needed to cost this much in the first place.