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'Digger': Tom Cruise Movie Bombs at Box Office, Will Lose $150M (deadline.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [M] to c/movies@piefed.social
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[–] 61 points 1 day ago (13 children)

I've seen brief ads and trailers for the movie and I still have no idea what it's about or why I might want to go see it. Tom Cruise plays an old guy who... does stuff, I guess? And John Goodman's in it? But, like... what is it? I genuinely don't know.

I think the art of making a trailer has been lost somehow. My "return to monke" hot take is that trailers were better when they followed the "in a world where..." format, or the "...but now, he's about to find out..." format. At least they communicated what movies were about.

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  • [–] 5 points 13 hours ago*

    It's a satire about the American Military-Industrial complex, the way it's steered by a few powerful assholes, the way it responds to catastrophes (including self-inflicted ones like climate change), the way it has created our post-truth age. Cruise is an oil man, Goodman is the US president.

    That's what I thought the trailer was telling me, anyway.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    "Rob Schneider is.... A carrot!" Is what came to mind from your quote.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    But that's my point: the movie itself might be shit, but the trailer does the intended job of telling me what the movie's about: Rob Schneider turns into a carrot, wacky hijinks ensue. The South Park joke works as well as it does because that format works so well at making you instantly imagine the plot of the movie (and how inane it must be).

    If your movie's so shit that you think the only way to trick people into watching it is telling them less about it, you've already fucked up and deceptive/vague marketing won't save it.

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  • [–] 4 points 15 hours ago

    I remember when Wall-E was the first big title to pull a stunt like that. All the trailers were about the little robot collecting junk on an empty world, and moviegoers were surprised with "suddenly, girl" and going to space. That made a lot of noise at the time, everybody loved it.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago

    Most times if the movie is trash they put the best parts of it in a trailer, like that one single action sequence in a 90 minutes slugfest. When a bad trailer doesn't do even that I assume the marketing team didn't have anything of use in what they got sent by production. Or that the movie is designed to flop, like if a studio only wanted to keep a hold of this IP.

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  • [–] 7 points 22 hours ago (1 child)

    There's a "plot twist" about 20 minutes in that for some reason they don't want to spoil. Tom Cruise's rich white oil guy schtick is actually a theatre play being put on within the film, so there are some "normal" Cruise scenes about what's happening around the play. But all of that is inconsequential and has zero bearing on anything, so I don't know why it's being hidden in the promos.

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