DIGGING OUT

Emmy Winner Blames Critics for Brutal Box Office Flop

Tom Cruise’s “Digger” lost a jaw-dropping amount of money.

Emmy-winning actor John Goodman has fired back at critics over the colossal box-office failure of Digger, in which he starred alongside Tom Cruise.

Goodman, 74, revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he was “hurt” by audiences’ reaction to the film, a big-budget black comedy directed by Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

The Roseanne actor said critics “kind of killed us before we opened,” quoting mock headlines like, “This Will Only Make $5.”

Still, he believes the movie’s impact will last. “It’s going to be around for a long time,” he said. “I’m proud of it, and I had a ball doing it. It was a good six months out of my life,”

Goodman revealed that Iñárritu gave him the script and as soon as he read it, “I was in.”

“I really liked it and I laughed out loud and it was full of twists that I didn’t see coming,” he said.

Digger was highly anticipated throughout 2026 but its arrival was met with both critical and commercial failure.

The Daily Beast’s Nick Schager called it “a catastrophe,” describing the film as “a tedious satire, slamming capitalistic greed, anti-environmental profiteering, rampant corruption, and horrid narcissism with all the bluntness of the shovel its protagonist reveres.”

“Equal parts Looney Tunes farce, earnest screed, and back-patting gimmick, it’s a disaster almost on par with the one its protagonist incites—and, consequently, not the film that’ll get Cruise back on dramatic track,” he wrote.

Most critics agreed. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 53 percent approval rating.

However, a slew of celebrities and stars backed Cruise, 64. Anne Hathaway, Neil Young, Jane Fonda, Glen Powell, and Ben Affleck all came out in support of the movie, praising its premise and slamming critics.

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Young urged people to watch it with “an open mind” and went so far as to call it “the best film” he’s ever seen.

“This is a pretty ambitious, interesting movie made by people who have talent,” Affleck said. “And everybody wants to count the money, what it lost, or whatever.”

Digger cost a whopping $160 million to make but pulled in just over $49 million at the global box office. In early October, reports suggested it could lose Warner Bros. as much as $245 million.

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Meera NavlakhaEntertainment Reporter

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