Tom Cruise’s Digger has landed with a thud — $8 million domestically, $12 million global, but the real fallout may be in how Hollywood responds. Ben Affleck isn’t celebrating the bomb. He’s warning against it. Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he called out the rush to mock the film as if its failure were a victory for taste. 'Everybody wants to count the money, what it lost or whatever,' he said. 'To me, I just think… if you punish movies that take risks, guess what you’re going to get? A bunch of shitty, homogenized movies.' The message: ambition is messy. And when studios see a big swing go wrong, they’ll play it safe next time. That’s the fear. Not the film’s performance. The precedent. Digger, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, was meant to be a satirical fever dream about climate collapse and political theater. Cruise playing a man who believes he’s the last sane person left. But The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney didn’t buy it. ‘Piloted by a spectacularly obnoxious Tom Cruise,’ he wrote, calling it a ‘heavy-handed cataclysm scenario’ with no one holding the reins. Still, not everyone agrees. Anne Hathaway, whose own film Verity opened strong, gave Digger a perfect 10/10 on Letterboxd. ‘I loved this brilliant movie. It’s smart and trippy and aggressive and funny and ambitious,’ she wrote. She urged people to see it for themselves. So where does that leave the conversation? On the edge of a cliff. One side sees a failed experiment. The other sees a reckoning. And the studio notes are already being made.