Digger, Tom Cruise’s ham-fisted satire about capitalism and global warming, is expected to lose $250 million for Warner Bros. The movie had originally been developed at Netflix alongside Don’t Look Up, Leonardo DiCaprio’s satire about global warming and capitalism, which lost a more modest $100 million. But at least $46 million of that came from Massachusetts taxpayers who helped subsidize the movie for Netflix: a poor quarter-trillion monopolistic streaming giant.
That’s probably the only funny joke between both of the $350 million disasters.
The Guardian, the paper for rich British socialists who hate the rich and vacation every year in Monaco, complained that Digger’s failure marked the death of “eat the rich satire”. The article fondly reminisced that “there was a brief moment when audiences couldn’t get enough movie takedowns of the uber-wealthy, with the breakout success of Parasite inspiring Hollywood to seize upon its class-conscious themes and drag them into the west. The sustained fallout from the Covid pandemic brought issues of wealth inequality further into the spotlight.”
The vast majority of Americans, and for that matter Brits, had never heard of this trend or, for that matter, The Guardian, and don’t go to movies to see “class-conscious themes”, but to spend $22 or £15 forgetting about “class-conscious themes”. And when the movie industry that thinks a family movie night out should top $100 decides to lecture about “class conscious themes” with all the subtlety of an announcer in a Monty Python bit, they stay home.
And people are already staying home from theaters. That’s how Netflix’s bosses got so rich.
Satires of ‘capitalism’ by satirists whose malice and contempt had quenched any sense of humor had come and gone somewhere between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. And from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie to The Magic Christian, they lost money at the box office because there weren’t enough upper-class socialist twits to make up for their budgets. But at least Bunuel discreetly spent $800,000 ($6 million and change in today’s dollars) rather than blowing $250 million to pay for Tom Cruise and his makeup.
The only thing Digger proved is that its pretentious director Alejandro Inarritu, the grandson of a Mexican Supreme Court justice, is no Bunuel, Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay is certainly no Stanley Kubrick and should have stuck to Saturday Night Live skits, Will Ferrell comedies or just donating gobs of money to Democrats, and Tom Cruise barely shares any DNA with Peter Sellers.
But it stands to reason that the biggest fans of satires about capitalism are industry millionaires. While audiences stayed home, wealthy fake ‘everyman’ comedian Bill Burr urged people to go see Digger. “It’s fantastic. There’s subtle metaphors in there,” Burr claimed. Having a gleeful. cackling Tom Cruise dancing around while destroying the earth is probably subtle. To Burr.
“The stuff that they say we’re headed toward, and they do it in satire, it’s amazing,” he claimed.
Burr, whose estimated net worth is in the nine figures, recently suggested that billionaires should be satisfied with $900 million. Maybe he should be satisfied with selling tickets for $150 instead of the average price of $178 to come and hear him deliver socialism with punch lines.
And maybe Netflix should have been satisfied with $18 a month instead of charging $20.
Cruise should have settled for $15 million for Digger instead of $20 million (plus a hilariously optimistic participation deal) and DiCaprio could have settled for $20 million instead of $30 million for Don’t Look Up. But for all their scolding about how we ought to settle for less, the millionaire socialists never actually rein in their own greed. And why should they?
The real twist in Digger isn’t that the whole thing is a stage play about the environmental disaster that wrecked the planet: it’s that the real ‘Digger’ was its star, director and producers who turned a disaster movie into a disaster by selfishly demanding and squandering money.
And all to produce polished squeaky clean studio versions of the raw and edgy 70s fare by Brunel, Kubrick, and De Palma without any of their energy or explosive anarchy. There’s nothing anarchic about spending nine figures at Netflix or WB so a director in his sixties can film a workshopped satire about how the public doesn’t care enough about his political issues.
Early 70s social satire could at least pretend to be challenging some phantom establishment while 2020s social satire is the establishment preaching to the choir only to discover that the church is empty because no one except the castratos bothered showing up to the premiere.
It’s awkward, but not truly deadly, because nine figures is just chump change to an organization like Netflix: whose bosses finance California politics and who spend $17 billion on content. An independent director mortgaging his house and losing millions on a movie is wiped out, but the establishment is too big to fail because it contrived to make its slop into the only game in town.
That’s why Netflix or Disney can shrug off massive woke disasters and go on financing new ones. The subject is ripe for satire, but of course no one would ever go ahead and film it.
Sullivan’s Travels back in 1941 was the last time Hollywood would have a real belly laugh at its penchant for trying to make movies about serious subjects. The story of a director who tries to relate to the underclass, only to run screaming from the reality back to comedy when he realizes that the last thing the underclass wants is a movie about their plight has lessons for Hollywood.
Hollywood keeps trying to satirize the larger society for its obliviousness when it hasn’t the faintest idea what life outside its bubble looks like and the ripest subject for satire is looking back at it in the mirror. The corrupt establishment it wants to tilt at is it. Hollywood money elects California politicians and many national ones. When the industry isn’t blowing $350 million to tell us that we’re all ungrateful buffoons for not recycling enough, it’s directing hundreds of millions into every state in the country in the hope of inflicting a putatively progressive cretin of its own class like Jon Ossoff or Graham Platner on someplace they only fly over on vacation.
And barring activist shareholders, FBI investigations into its accounting practices or a sudden outbreak of sanity, things will go on until the industry is replaced by AI and has to get real jobs.
That’s probably due around 2033. Don’t look up.
This article previously appeared at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Front Page Magazine.
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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.