Sometimes, just sometimes, the A game alone isn’t enough. Sometimes, just sometimes, owning a phone might be a good idea because then somebody can call you on it to break bad news. News like the fact that the Tom Cruise-led and Alejandro Inarritu-directed dark comedy Digger is in deep, deep trouble.
Projections were already as low as $18-20 million for the domestic opening weekend, which is bad juju for a movie that cost $125 million to make. It seems to have got worse. Variety reports that tracking now suggests an opening of just $12-15 million. The trade also claims the production budget is much higher than the official figure after production ran long, and that $100 million has been spent on marketing.
To put this into context, notorious summer flop Supergirl pulled in $38 million domestically and $68 million worldwide on its opening weekend, and that was judged to be an absolute disaster. That also had a budget of $125 million. So we are talking crater visible from space territory here for Digger.
A Warner spokesman has disputed the numbers, but the break-even point will still be around $300 million. This ain’t getting close to that, especially with the divisive reviews.
Warner Bros has had a tricky year, with the aforementioned Supergirl and The Bride both hitting the balance sheet.
