Guillermo del Toro Defends Digger and Urges Fans to See It in Theatres
Guillermo del Toro has jumped to the defence of Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger, calling a review headline petty and urging audiences to see it in a cinema, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Del Toro posted on X under the handle @RealGDT within the 24 hours before the trade's report on Oct. 2. The film stars Tom Cruise, according to Collider.
He was responding to a post from IGN that read: "The theater experience won’t change your mind on Digger, and the laughs that are there still will be when it hits HBO Max." Del Toro called that an "Entirely Petty headline."
He said he loves Digger. It "delivers in scale, ambition and reach at a theatrical screen level," he wrote.
He went further. Digger is "Daring, bold and Cinematically complex" and "Decidedly a Theatrical experience." His message was simple. See it in a theatre.
Del Toro framed the divisive response as part of a longer pattern. He compared Digger to Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils, which critics at the time called "excessive, overbearing." He also described Digger as a "climate change" movie that is "NOT about climate change but the manipulation of narratives."
The defence arrived as Digger was eyeing a domestic opening weekend south of $15 million, domestic meaning the United States and Canada. At the time of the report, it sat at 54 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregate site, with a 65 percent audience score.
There is history here. Iñárritu and del Toro have been friends for decades and, with Alfonso Cuarón, are known as Mexican cinema's "Three Amigos." Del Toro also noted that Digger was released by Warner Bros., possibly the very last movie the studio as such will ever release.
What makes this stand out is the theatre-versus-streaming argument. Del Toro did not just dispute a review. He pitched the big screen as the right place to judge a large-scale release.
Del Toro's next film is The Buried Giant, a stop-motion animated adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2015 novel for Netflix.
