Up in smoke … Digger director Alejandro González Iñárritu (left) and Tom Cruise at the film’s Japanese premiere in Tokyo on 6 October. Photograph: Keizo Mori/UPI/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Up in smoke … Digger director Alejandro González Iñárritu (left) and Tom Cruise at the film’s Japanese premiere in Tokyo on 6 October. Photograph: Keizo Mori/UPI/Shutterstock Film How we lost our appetite for eat-the-rich satire Alastair Ryder Tom Cruise’s latest film could lose $250m (£190m) – could one reason be that audiences are tired of Hollywood telling them what they already know about the super-rich?
It seems as if nobody can decide who should shoulder most of the blame for the recent box office flop of Digger .
Was it the ousted Warner Bros film executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose love of big-budget auteur cinema usually came with a hefty price tag? Or was it the marketing team, who were responsible for hiding the movie’s biggest swing from all trailers, ensuring many viewers would be left alienated from its early meta-reveal onwards?
The truthful answer is that the film’s fate was sealed long before anybody could point fingers over its failure. In the past year it’s become clear that audiences have grown tired of the worn-out cinematic trend Digger is a part of: the eat-the-rich satire.
There was a brief moment when audiences couldn’t get enough movie takedowns of the uber-wealthy, with the breakout success of Parasite inspiring Hollywood to seize upon its class-conscious themes and drag them into the west. The sustained fallout from the Covid pandemic brought issues of wealth inequality further into the spotlight, and titles as varied as Glass Onion , Saltburn , Triangle of Sadness and The Menu all spoke to the zeitgeist with their distinct, controversial takedowns of the 1%.
On the small screen, Succession and The White Lotus rapidly increased their audiences after acclaimed first seasons, thanks to the promise of darkly comic social commentary skewering those at the top of the food chain. Audiences were more than ready to eat the rich, but their appetites were satiated long before Hollywood had even considered switching up the menu.
Digger is the most high-profile casualty of this trend running its course, with some reports predicting it could lose a staggering $250m (£190m) during its cinema run. The divisive reviews and audience reactions are easy to blame, but perhaps it would have been better received had audiences not grown exhausted by constant cinematic reminders about how much they’ve been screwed over by the rich and powerful.
The theme hasn’t grown any less urgent, but interest in movies that hold a cracked mirror up to this reality has waned. Already this year, two action-revenge movies pitting lower-class protagonists against the super-rich in fights to the death – Ready or Not 2 and They Will Kill You – belly-flopped at the box office, and even arthouse audiences seem to be exhausted by this brand of topical satire, if receipts for Rosebush Pruning and I Love Boosters are anything to go by.
On the small screen, the return of anthology series Beef, an awards sensation and streaming hit in its first run, failed to register as it pivoted to this familiar class satire, barely cracking Netflix’s daily top 10 before disappearing entirely.
Later this week, Romain Gavras’s Sacrifice will debut on Netflix with no fanfare, more than a year after its hotly anticipated festival premiere landed with a thud . It…