Posted on 10/14/2026 9:27:38 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Has climate hysteria finally run its course? I ask because the latest Hollywood blockbuster on the subject seems to have bombed.
Digger, in which Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon so intent on drilling that he causes an ice shelf off Greenland to collapse, provoking climatic disaster, took only about $8 million in its first weekend, not great when it needs $280 million of box office takings just to break even.
According to seasoned observers it is on course to lose Warner Bros $245 million, which would make it one of the worst cinema disasters of all time. Not even an endorsement from Jane Fonda, who described it as “a new way to wake us up about climate change” seems to have enticed the public.
This didn’t used to happen. In the past climate disaster movies have tended to have a good hearing. The Day After Tomorrow, an absurd tale in which New York disappears beneath an ice sheet (how that is consistent with Al Gore’s vision of an ice-free North Pole I am not sure) was taken seriously by easily-manipulated audiences.
Five years ago, Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, broke Netflix download records. That one featured a comet heading for Earth which scientists struggle to persuade politicians to take seriously – an obvious allegory for climate change.
What has gone wrong? Maybe it is that Tom Cruise owns one private jet too many. DiCaprio seemed to get away with his private jet habit, which once involved him taking an 8,000-mile round trip across the Atlantic to collect a climate award.
Trouble is that Cruise has three jets in his hangar, which is just a little over the top by anyone’s standards. He has a Gulfstream fitted, apparently, with a jacuzzi, plus a Bombardier and a Honda for those short trips when it doesn’t quite seem worth spooling up the Gulfstream, and there will be no time to take a jacuzzi anyway.
I guess the film-going public has just had a bit too much of celebrities with a yeti-sized carbon footprint preaching climate change to them. You, the little people, need a lesson on saving the world, Cruise seems to be saying; if I need a few private jets to help me spread the message, then that is all well and good.
Sorry, but there can hardly be a conscious human on the planet who hasn’t heard of climate change. We don’t need a Hollywood film to tell us about it. As for the kind of hysteria that it portrayed in this work, that is counterproductive to promoting genuine understanding of the climate. One company’s drilling doesn’t collapse a glacier, and nor, thankfully, does one celebrity’s private jet habit.
This leaves the question of what Cruise really believes. Does he think that the oil industry, as seems to be intimated in Digger, bears sole responsibility for carbon emissions, and that its customers – like him – bear no responsibility at all? Does he think, like the people who try to sue tobacco companies for the harm caused by their smoking habits, that he is under some kind of duress to use oil companies’ products? The more you look at it, the more that Cruise comes across as the equivalent of the anti-hero in his film, so tied up with his own self-importance that he turns a blind eye to his own actions.
It is perhaps no accident that Hollywood climate preaching is being rejected now, in the midst of an oil crisis. There are plenty of people who would just like to keep their homes warm this winter, not fly off in a private jet. The reality is, however, that much you might wish the world could switch to clean energy overnight, globally fossil fuels still account for three quarters of energy consumption. We can live without Hollywood movies, but not without the oil industry.
Yep - I was going to comment that I thought he was smarter than that - then remembered he’s a follower of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology crap.
Great actor is a bit much. I all of his successful films, he’s essentially playing the same character. Limited range.
Hollyweirdos spent $250M on a movie? Sounds like a do-nothing USAID project.
LOL
They even timed this movie for the mid-terms. It’s failure is a great indicator of what we can expect from the mid-terms.
“Sorry, but there can hardly be a conscious human on the planet who hasn’t heard of climate change.”
And there can hardly be a thinking person who actually believes in climate change.
I saw the previews for this and thought, “I’ll pass.”
Tom Cruise has gotten lost in the hollywood bubble. He is making this movie for his insider friends. He has lost touch with the rest of the country that doesn’t give a damn about “climate change”.
It will flop, get an award and he will make another flop.
Half of FR seems to believe that also.
Some people I follow on X (who are definitely not woke) have said the film is spectacular. It just can't find an audience.
Don’t forget acid rain?
I have read multiple reviews of this and I still have no idea what it’s about. I read about things like climate change but I have yet to hear anything resembling a plot.
Replaced. He’s a White man.
HE probably should have won for “Collateral”. Where Cruise played a contract killer and Jamie Fox played the cab driver taking him around LA.
IMHO his best acting performance by far.
Acid rain was real. It did effect the PH of lakes in the Adirondacks in the 1970s. No different than the PH in my swimming pool at my former house would be effected by big summer thunderstorms. When it would rain 1-2” in a few hours after it had not rained in several weeks. I would always end up going to the pool store to buy a box of PH increaser. That is because the rain would wash all the pollutants out of the atmosphere and fall into my pool. With sulfur dioxide being one of those main pollutants. Basically dumping a mild form of Sulfuric Acid into my pool. This was explained to me by the guy who owned the pool store.
The coal fired plants in OH and PA, plus all the steel mills put huge amounts of Sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. The lakes in the Adirondacks just happened to by downwind from a lot of those coal burning electrical plants. The PH got continually lowered by the pollutants that washed out of the air after rains. The LIE was that those lakes would be FOREVER DEAD.
They put scrubbers on the smoke stacks of the coal plants and eventually the lakes PH increased and the fishies came back. The EPA also put Catalytic converters on all automobiles. This greatly decreased the pollutants in the exhaust of millions of autos. Plus a lot of those steel mills shut down because their union operations could not compete with imported steel.
It made our air cleaner. Even in places like LA. Where they do not have the SMOG they did back in the 1970s and 1980s.
The ISSUE was putting those scrubbers on the coal fired electric generation plants increased their cost. So, the utility had to raise their price/KHW. Just like the auto manufacturers increased their price on the auto because the pollution standards.
A friend of mine has a 1964 Corvette. Every once in awhile I will take a ride in it. That car STINKS. Meaning the amount of exhaust coming out of the tailpipe is 10x worse than any modern car even with a bigger V8 engine. Another buddy used to have a 69 Camaro SS convertible. A fun car to cruise around in. But it also STANK even worse.
It’s silly making political pronouncements based on a flop.
Plenty of leftie critics describe Digger’s plot as a confusing mishmash, along the lines of Coppola’s disastrous Megalopolis.
It’s a shame, because González Iñárritu made one of my favorite movies of recent years, Birman, with Michael Keaton.
I used to work at a movie theater when I was in college.
Our theatre had this movie. I have seen it a thousand times. Terrible movie. Only good thing was Duvall.
>> The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed &etc — H. L. Mencken
Interesting quote, and new to me! Thanks.
>> Great actor is a bit much.
Yeah, that’s why I said “good actor, great in a couple movies”. I really DID enjoy Top Gun II.
The dummy, if he would have made a decent movie using the Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder character he’d be laughing all the way to the bank.
Digger is part of the insane Hollywood trend of spending an absolute fortune to make a movie that everyone knows is not going to make a lot at the box office. Digger is a vanity project of Tom Cruise to get him an Oscar. It was never going to make money at the box office. If he thought it would, it was delusion based on massive ego or maybe Scientology mumbo-jumbo. The budget should have been about $20 million and he should have worked for free or for a percentage only. The same thing happened with last year’s Julia Roberts flop After the Hunt. It was glaringly obvious that it was never going to make more that a couple million even though it had “A-list” movie stars like Roberts and Andrew Garfield but the budget was something like $80 million. Insanity. People with more money than sense.
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