Flop Analysis: DIGGER

Ah, DIGGER... The movie whose trailers make everyone go "huh?"

What people think about the quality of this movie has very little to do with its tragic $20m WWBO gross this past weekend.

A movie doesn't bomb in its opening weekend because of a flawed or polarizing story, it bombs because its marketing was ineffective.

And this movie might have had THE worst marketing I've seen for a film of this size and depth.

Every time I saw this trailer before a movie I actually wanted to see, I either went to the bathroom or started talking to the person next to me.

The trailer had such little grasp on me, I didn't even realize Tom Cruise was in it despite his name appearing in giant typeface at both the start and end.

And let me tell you: when you don't realize Tom Cruise is the star, what's left to pull you is the plot and humor -- both of which are criminally undersold in the trailer (intentionally, but we'll get to that)

And that's almost singularly the reason this movie flopped so hard on its opening weekend, despite being an actually decent movie: the trailer doesn't really show us what the movie is about, or offer another compelling reason we should see it.

I understand not wanting to spoil the movie's several twists, and actually I think that was the right choice. But there's a big difference between not spoiling the movie and not explaining the movie.

The trailer doesn't provide basic information that would help sell the audience on the film's concept:

It doesn't tell us Tom Cruise's character, Digger Rockwell, is an oil tycoon.

It doesn't tell us what exactly the worldwide disaster is.

It doesn't tell us how it happened.

It doesn't even explicitly tell us what Digger's relationship to it is.

We just know that Tom Cruise is a weird, extremely powerful guy and... Something very bad is happening.

Which is simply not enough to sell seats to break even on a nearly $200m movie (not including the marketing budget! 😮‍💨)

The trailer tells us the world is ending, but if we don't understand how or why any of this is happening, “the world is ending” becomes abstract.

Therefore, we can't connect with the stakes. So we look for something to connect with in the plot...

But when the plot is undersold in the trailer, the character becomes the hook by default.

And therein lies the problem.

Because the biggest question when watching the trailer is: why should I care about this guy? He's rich, powerful to the point of being seemingly untouchable... And he's quirky.

Cool. Who is he? What's actually at stake for him?

I need to understand why I should care about the world ending for this guy specifically.

The marketing makes DIGGER look like a caricature of this one bizarre man. But the movie is actually a caricature of the entire world.

It's an absurd satire about politics, climate change, corporate responsibility, the way society consumes and responds to tragedy, the way we turn real suffering into entertainment, and ironically how art increasingly needs funding from large corporations to exist...

And I think that's where the marketing went wrong.

It seems like the trailer is trying to appeal to the widest possible audience. Which makes sense -- they're trying to convince as many people as possible to see this movie so they can recoup its gigantic budget.

But in not letting it seem too political or quirky, not explaining the plot, not spoiling the twist, and just showing Tom Cruise being weird while the world is ending... It strips the movie of almost everything that makes it interesting.

If you like Tom Cruise, this doesn't look like a traditional Tom Cruise movie.

If you like disaster movies, you don't really know what the disaster is.

If you like political satire, you wouldn't necessarily know this is a political satire.

If you like weird movies, you have no idea just how weird this movie is...

The marketing is trying to sell everyone the movie and, in doing so, doesn't give anyone a particularly good reason to see it.

The trailer makes you think you're watching a Tom Cruise character study about some bizarre billionaire during the apocalypse. But you're actually watching a satire about the world that created him. And communicating that more effectively in the trailer could've potentially saved the whole movie.