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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.
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Digger is a woke movie? The audience is used to Tom Cruise in Top Gun and Mission Impossible movies.
Cruise is a good actor — great in Top Gun and Top Gun:Maverick, but he always has been a sawdust-for-brains. Then again, he’s a Scientologist, therefore dain bramaged from the get-go.
The Carbon scam is particularly annoying to me because Carbon Dioxide is good for plants. 97% of the Carbon in the food we eat was pulled out of the air!
People would be shocked at the vast utilities consumption of the wealthy’s estates, and each one of them around the world consume those vast amounts, and they do it all year long, not just when the owner shows up, and I would love to know what a super rich person’s hotel suite uses when the entire hotel and staff, kitchen, worker travel to work, uniforms and laundry, is taken in consideration and how it compares to a night at a Motel 6 and running the A/C all night while leaving the bathroom light on and whatever is consumed by the rest of the lights outside and the electricity in the office.
Sean Penn learned you never go full retard (”I Am Sam”).
Leonardo DiCaprio learned you never go full Al Gore (”Don’t Look Up”).
Tom Cruise, villainizing the oil industry, didn’t learn from DiCaprio.
There’s an argument to be made that da Erf was in danger of life ending due to atmospheric carbon shortage death until Man started getting serious about burning stuff a couple hundred years ago, and upping the atmospheric counts usefully.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
— H. L. Mencken
Let’s just hope his next Days Of Thunder meets the same fate. What a stupid movie the first one was.
All I can think of is “Go Woke go Broke”
One benefit of getting older is that you can remember the various scares the Left has thrown at us. First it was global cooling along with "nuclear winter". Then it was global warming. When that was exposed as a hoax, "climate change" became the next boogeyman. That's pretty convenient since the climate is always changing.
According to seasoned movie scene observers, the Tom Cruise
movie flop is on-course to lose Warner Bros $245 million.
That would make it one of the worst cinema disasters of all time.
Mmmmm.....I just love getting “good news” from Hollyweird.
Remember when all the hollywood stars and politicians were screaming about the climate crisis, and they all quickly sold their beachfront mansions because of the rising seas?
Yeah...
To paraphrase Orwell in Animal Farm, every dictatorship needs a Snowball.
Free download for the book. It's a very quick read.
250M loss? Does it get Tom an Oscar? Mission Accomplished.
One benefit of getting older is that you can remember the various scares the Left has thrown at us. First it was global cooling along with "nuclear winter". Then it was global warming. When that was exposed as a hoax, "climate change" became the next boogeyman. That's pretty convenient since the climate is always changing.
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.Indeed, we should make more of an effort to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.
Fission, baby! Fission!
Rather than decommissioning aging nuclear power plants, we should be building new ones.
Regards,
The production cost for Tom Cruise’s film “Digger” is estimated between $160-180 million.
While the project was originally green-lit by Warner Bros. with an “official budget” of $125
million, the production costs ballooned due to filming running over schedule and unexpected delays.
Additionally, the studio spent another $100 million on global
marketing campaigns, bringing Warner’s total investment to nearly $280 million.
Fortune magazine reported Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ could be one of Hollywood’s biggest flops
ever, with a projected $245 million loss, a ballooning budget, and a $350 million breakeven.
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