With reviews for "Digger" coming in poorly, Warner Bros. has gone nuclear with its marketing, inviting audiences to ignore the verdicts and "decide for yourself."
An hour or so after reviews dropped, the studio released an ad that embraces the mixed reactions, placing positive and negative quotes side by side. One frame pairs "Masterpiece" with "Unpleasant," while others flip between "Brilliant" and "Baffling," and "Magnificent" and "Insufferable." The tagline sums up the pitch: "Same film, different truth."
The ad was obviously planned well in advance, in anticipation of the scathing reviews the film received today. It's a daring move to get ahead of the bad press, and it might be the best Warner Bros. can hope for at this point: when you can't win over the critics, sell the controversy. The film currently holds a 52% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes.
It's rare, but Warner Bros. isn't the first studio to turn bad press into a selling point. The best example is still David Lynch's "Lost Highway." When Siskel and Ebert gave it "two thumbs down" back in 1997, the marketing team slapped the verdict right on the poster and called it "two more great reasons" to see the movie. Genius. More recently, Lionsgate tried something similar with Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis," cutting a trailer around harsh reviews of his past classics to preempt the backlash. That one blew up in their faces when it turned out the quotes had been fabricated.
"Digger" is a different beast, though. This is a big studio, a nine-figure budget and Tom Cruise, and they're still openly telling you some people found it "insufferable." Honestly, having now seen the film, I can say the marketing and trailers have been very deceiving, a total lie to audiences about what kind of movie this is. That said, if the trailers had shown what the film is actually about, I doubt it would have drawn a bigger audience.
Regardless, consider me stunned that a studio would put that word on the marketing for a $180M movie. It's a sign of desperation. Tracking has the film opening in the $9–10M range domestically.
My hope is that the passionately divisive reactions only make audiences more curious to catch this unique film, whether in theatres or eventually on streaming.
Earlier today, we got our first look at Joseph Kosinski's "Miami Vice '85," which is now filming. The cast is sprawling, and we can add yet another talented actor to the mix.