Guillermo del Toro & Alfonso Cuarón Rush to Defend Iñárritu's ‘Digger’ After Negative Reviews: “Entirely Petty”

When one amigo gets hit, the other two show up. That's been the deal for three decades between Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, and it's playing out in real time this weekend as "Digger" with 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, and $7M opening weekend, needs defending.

Cuarón, who rarely shows up on social media, surfaced on X with a post that needed no explanation. He laid out a list of now l-classics that were savaged by some critics on release: "Blade Runner," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Metropolis" and Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game," pairing the original pans with how those same films are regarded today. He never mentioned "Digger" by name. He didn't have to. We know what he was implying.

Del Toro, never one to be quiet, went much further. The "Frankenstein" and "The Shape of Water" filmmaker posted several times over the past 24 hours, first taking aim at IGN, which had suggested that seeing "Digger" in a theater wouldn't change anyone's mind and that whatever laughs exist will still be there once it hits HBO Max. Del Toro called it "Entirely Petty," adding that, love it or not (and he does), the film "delivers in scale, ambition and reach at a theatrical screen level. Daring, bold and Cinematically complex. Decidedly a Theatrical experience."

He then pivoted to Ken Russell's "The Devils," recalling how, as a kid in Mexico, he watched critics dismiss the 1971 Warner Bros. release as "excessive, overbearing" while the Church branded it blasphemy. Now, he wrote, he loves it more than ever, because it's really about what political narratives do with possession, not possession itself. "Glad WB takes risks — even now…"

Then the less subtle messaging: "BTW there is a 'climate change' movie in release that Is NOT about climate change but the manipulation of narratives — and yes it is released by WB (possibly the very last movie WB as such will ever release) and has been deemed 'excessive, overbearing' so see it in a theatre."

As mentioned, the problem is the box office as "Digger" is now tracking for a domestic opening of $7M, which is absolutely brutal for a film that cost anywhere between $160M-$180M, and a rough number for a Tom Cruise picture. It sits at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, with audiences a bit warmer at 71%, and the Letterboxd score is surprisingly strong (3.7).

To be fair, the critical pile-on is not surprising. Iñárritu's stock with critics has been sliding for years now. Sure, the back-to-back Best Director wins for "Birdman" and "The Revenant" made him Hollywood embraced, but it also produced a counter-narrative that he's a show-off, more interested in style than his own characters.

Then "Bardo" happened. The Venice premiere in 2022 was rough, maybe the worst reviews of his career, it was derided as bloated and self-indulgent. So by the time "Digger" rolled around, a lot of critics had already decided what an Iñárritu movie is. Which is why that 51% really isn’t that surprising.