**This article contains spoilers for the movie Digger**
As the 2026 summer movie season comes off a historical run, with the domestic box office reaching a record high of $4.765 billion, this success seemed it’d continue into the fall season. One of the most anticipated fall movies was Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger.
The movie stars Tom Cruise, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemons. It follows Digger Rockwell and his quest to save the world from a natural disaster he caused. The film seemed very promising, but once it was released, the movie didn’t reach the same highs expected of it.
Digger was released on Oct. 2 and only made around $8 million in its opening weekend with a production budget between $160 million and $180 million. This makes Digger the biggest flop of 2026 so far, and one of the biggest movie flops in history.
Not only is this movie flopping, but it has also received extremely mixed reviews, with most critics and viewers either loving or hating the movie. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scored a 53% for critical reviews and a 74% from audience reviews. What exactly about this movie created such a divide between viewers?
The Plot Twist
After seeing the movie myself, it becomes clear: it has everything to do with its major plot twist. For those who haven’t seen this movie, there are twists and turns consistently sprinkled throughout the movie, but the first one definitely hit the hardest.
About 35 minutes in, it’s revealed that everything we have seen up until that point is all fake, part of a theatrical play. Even the characters we’ve been following up to this point are all actors in a play, and the audience gets to see how Curtis, the actor who plays Digger, thinks and feels about the character he’s playing.
After the twist is revealed, the movie flips between the events of the play and the actor’s moments between each scene, with one scene focusing on the absurd events in the play and then immediately cutting the scene to focus on the actor’s thoughts about the play. This twist completely recontextualizes the whole movie, which is where problems arise.
Metafiction Movie Trope
Digger follows the classic trope of “it’s all just a dream,” but if it went on for another 90 minutes. When any story spends half of its first act setting up a plotline just to reveal that it was all fake, it can completely disconnect audiences.
Before this turning point, the movie had hinted at the twist through its set design and over-the-top performances, but the viewers can feel disconnected from the story since now they know the events of the play are fake and that none of these people are real.
Having the twist be that everything you had seen up until that point is fake can destroy the rest of the movie.
After this point, you notice all of the extremely dramatic performances as less genuine, or you realize that the jokes don’t hit as hard because they were written to be as absurd as possible so that they would match the actors’ overly theatrical performances. While the movie has another twist that reveals that the play is based on real-life events in the past, it’s only told to the audience during the third act, which is too little, too late.
Why The Twist Works
While it sounds like I’m completely hating on this movie, I actually fall on the side of adoring this twist. From my perspective, the movie felt off in its delivery during the first half because the jokes weren’t subtle in the slightest, and everyone wasn’t acting reasonably when faced with a disaster of major proportions.
This initial vibe from the movie sticks out to viewers, and when the twist is revealed, it’s shocking, but it explains why the beginning of the movie was so comedic and dramatic in its approach.
Also, after the twist, it adds a whole new layer to the story. There are multiple scenes in this movie where you can see the actor playing Digger break character for just a moment and then immediately go right back into this overly cartoonish performance. It’s a small detail, but it adds a lot to the theme of the movie, specifically that art surrounding real-life events can be interpreted in many ways but still resonate with everyone.
Whether you agree with the twist or not, Digger was meant to cause a reaction with its extremely out-there performances and dark humor jokes. When a movie like this comes around, it’s extremely fun because everyone came out of the theater with a different perspective on it, and that’s way more interesting than a movie that everyone thought was just okay.
Want to see more HCFSU? Be sure to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest!