Have audiences lost their appetite for manipulative movie scripts depicting catastrophes that never come?
Have audiences lost their appetite for manipulative movie scripts depicting catastrophes that never come?
I s this the end of the road for climate change disaster movies? Britain’s Daily Mail says the new movie Digger, which features Tom Cruise as a rapacious oil baron who provokes a climate apocalypse, “is on course to be the biggest box office flop of all time.” Its estimated global box office is set to top out at $50 million. It needs $350 million globally to break even.
Climate change disaster movies used to attract big audiences. The Day After Tomorrow, a 2004 film based in part on an Al Gore fever dream about New York covered by an ice sheet due to the melting Arctic, made a profit of over $500 million. In 2021, Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, broke Netflix records.
But decades of exaggerated predictions of climate change disaster coupled with energy price hiccups have reduced the appetite for manipulative movie scripts. Audiences have stayed away in droves, and even U.S. critics savaged Digger.
The response from Warner Bros., for which Digger was the last film made before the studio was acquired by Larry Ellison’s Skydance, has been to attack the audience. An online ad, since deleted, showed Cruise as Digger Rockwell saying, “America has stood beside the world in its darkest of hours,” to which an actor playing his sidekick shoots back, “Not anymore.”
The ad then flashed up a succession of critic quotes alongside a flag representing the critic’s country. A line from a French critic proclaimed the film “a Gem of Intelligence,” followed by the New York Post declaring it “An Unintentionally Bad Movie.”
The ad concluded with Cruise’s character declaring, “You decide which!” The Hollywood Reporter dryly noted “the sort-of implication: The rest of the world loves this movie — it’s just dumb Americans who fail to appreciate its genius.” One tongue-in-cheek online reviewer commented: “A film’s marketing calling out how dumb Americans are is such a beast mode move man, I might have to watch it now!”
But Warner’s has since dropped this “foreigners first” ad campaign, and it hasn’t even worked overseas.
“As much as you might wish the world could switch to clean energy overnight, globally fossil fuels still account for three-quarters of energy consumption,” commented Ross Clark in Britain’s The Spectator. “We can live without Hollywood movies, but not without the oil industry.”
