Ben Affleck Defends Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ Box Office Bomb

The ben affleck digger defense arrived with a warning for Hollywood. In a new interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Affleck pushed back against those celebrating the box office failure of Tom Cruise’s climate-crisis satire “Digger,” arguing the industry shouldn’t punish ambitious filmmaking.

“You see it happening now, frankly, with Digger. Everybody wants to celebrate this bomb as if it’s the most exciting thing that happened,” Affleck said. He called it “a pretty ambitious, interesting movie made by people who have talent” — and said fixating on the financials sends a dangerous message.

Don’t Punish Risk-Taking

“If you punish movies that take risks, guess what you’re gonna get? A bunch of s—-y, homogenized movies,” Affleck said. “You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing. And that means you’re gonna sometimes look bad.”

The film stars Cruise as a narcissistic oil baron who triggers an ecological catastrophe. Though it divided critics, it has found passionate defenders in Hollywood.

An Unlikely Champion

Among them: Anne Hathaway, who wrote her first — and only — Letterboxd review to praise the film. “I loved this brilliant movie. It’s smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious,” she wrote. “It’s worth making the time [to] see and decide for yourself what you make of it. For me? 10/10.”

Source: Entertainment Weekly