By Anthony Watts
Remember “shovel-ready”?
Back during the Obama years, that was Washington’s favorite description for projects supposedly ready to receive great piles of money and immediately get to work. Years later, Hollywood may finally have perfected the concept.
Meet Digger: perhaps the first genuinely shovel-ready movie. It arrived with the shovel, found the hole and, judging by the reported opening-weekend box office, immediately began digging its own grave. And digging. And digging. By the time the accountants finish measuring the excavation, they may need geological equipment.
Hollywood has produced legendary box-office bombs before, but the early numbers being reported for Digger put it in rather special territory. When a studio combines a massive production budget, an enormous promotional campaign, one of the world’s biggest movie stars and thousands of theater screen and still produces an opening weekend resembling a rounding error against the investment, you have something worth examining.
1 day ago Anthony Watts 62 Comments
Remember “shovel-ready”?
Back during the Obama years, that was Washington’s favorite description for projects supposedly ready to receive great piles of money and immediately get to work. Years later, Hollywood may finally have perfected the concept.
Meet Digger: perhaps the first genuinely shovel-ready movie. It arrived with the shovel, found the hole and, judging by the reported opening-weekend box office, immediately began digging its own grave. And digging. And digging. By the time the accountants finish measuring the excavation, they may need geological equipment.
Hollywood has produced legendary box-office bombs before, but the early numbers being reported for Digger put it in rather special territory. When a studio combines a massive production budget, an enormous promotional campaign, one of the world’s biggest movie stars and thousands of theater screen and still produces an opening weekend resembling a rounding error against the investment, you have something worth examining.
Surveying the Crater
Let’s begin with the numbers.
Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Tom Cruise, opened to approximately $8 million in the United States and Canada, according to weekend box-office reporting. It played in 3,321 North American theaters, which works out to roughly $2,400 per theater for the entire weekend.
International audiences didn’t exactly rush to the rescue. The movie took in another $12 million from 73 international markets, giving it a worldwide opening of approximately $20 million. The Associated Press said Digger “bombs.” The Los Angeles Times said it “cratered.” Variety went with “majorly bombs.” For once, the headline writers may have been exercising restraint.
Production-cost estimates vary, which is worth stating clearly. The Associated Press reported a production budget in the neighborhood of $125–150 million, while other industry reporting has placed it higher. On top of that comes a reported $100 million global marketing campaign. Variety reported that people familiar with comparable films put Digger’s theatrical break-even point around $350 million worldwide, while Warner Bros. reportedly argues that the figure is closer to $300 million.
When your optimistic scenario is that you need only $300 million and your opening weekend produces $20 million, this isn’t a pothole. It’s an open-pit mine.
Variety further reported estimates that Digger could lose somewhere between $150 million and $200 million theatrically, although the final accounting obviously won’t be known until the movie completes its run and ancillary revenues are considered. Even allowing for those uncertainties, the opening numbers are brutal.
Think about the basic economics. Hollywood appears to have spent somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter-billion dollars between making and marketing a movie about an oil billionaire triggering an environmental catastrophe—and the financial catastrophe arrived first.
You couldn’t script it better. Apparently, they couldn’t either.
…
