‘Anti-Corporate Propaganda’: Ben Shapiro Says Tom Cruise Picked The Wrong Movie

Tom Cruise’s “Digger” opened to just $8 million domestically against a reported production budget of $160 million to 180 million, and The Daily Wire’s Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro says the A-lister picked the wrong project. 

Shapiro called the climate-themed dark satire a “pretentious piece of anti-corporate propaganda,” arguing that its politics are “correct” in the eyes of the legacy media but couldn’t save it at the box office.

The film would have needed a domestic debut of roughly $40 million to justify its production budget, according to analysts cited by Variety. Its disappointing opening followed mixed reviews, with several critics delivering blistering assessments. 

Shapiro argued that Hollywood typically embraces films with those politics, pointing to the accolades heaped upon Paul Thomas Anderson’s hyper-partisan drama, “One Battle After Another,” which he characterized as hyper-partisan. 

Cruise has enjoyed enormous success with action films, including 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick.” But Shapiro recalled another departure from that formula, “Lions for Lambs,” as a project that puzzled many of the actor’s fans. He also called “Digger” director Alejandro González Iñárritu “one of the most overrated directors working.”

Shapiro went on to compare “Digger” to The Daily Wire’s recently released “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” which he described as the company’s biggest entertainment success to date. He argued that “Infidels” exceeded expectations without the favorable media reception he said its politics would have received had they aligned with Hollywood’s.  

“Digger” currently has a 51% critic’s score and 72% verified audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The Boston Globe called it “the worst movie of Tom Cruise’s career.” 

The Hollywood Reporter also didn’t hold back, describing it as “a climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic it makes Adam McKay’s ‘Don’t Look Up’ seem almost innocuous.”

“Audiences will urgently want to leave after the first five minutes,” the writer from The New York Post said.

But not everyone found the movie insufferable.

“Digger is a huge swing which may not connect for a lot of people, but its commitment to its messiness is nothing if not fascinating,” a Chicago Reader reviewer wrote. 

“Sure, not everyone will dig it. But as a Hollywood-star project, its existence is fascinating,” the reviewer from The Atlantic said.