Digger (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2026)

[cdnchris]

Saw this today. Not really sure what I thought of it, to be honest. I really disliked Birdman, but ultimately liked this much more, but that's really not high praise.

What interested me, though, was I feel this may have done better at the box office (not a hit, just less of a bomb) if the advertising just straight up explained what the film was actually about, especially since it's given away so early. I mentioned to my daughter that I saw this and when she asked how it was I ended up just explaining the plot to her, and afterwards she said "That sounds better than the trailer I saw. It looked so stupid!" And it went from her having zero interest in watching it to she'll put in the effort to watch it when it's streaming, even though it was obvious I'm clearly mixed on it.

[Noiretirc]

Ha!

How many bombs were bombs mostly because of the advertising?

[cdnchris]

It would have still flopped I feel; it had 0 chance making its money back. But you look at audience reactions and they're actually not terrible, so it seems most who are seeing it at least think it's okay. Even that one cinema score metric was like a C+, which isn't great but better than I would have anticipated. Other Mommy got a D+.

No direct spoilers ahead, but warning anyway...

Sorry, I know this contributes nothing to the film itself, but I'm just bewildered by the marketing. It was shit, as clearly stated elsewhere, but i really feel this would have gone over better if they were up front about it, or at least hinted. Was there a point to hiding it? It's revealed a few minutes in! Was that a director choice or was it just Warner not having faith in the concept?