Tom Cruise's 'Digger' Fights Bad Reviews with an Ad: 'Fuck Those People'

Tom Cruise says "Fuck those people!" — and Warner Bros. is betting an entire marketing campaign on it.

The line comes from Cruise's performance as Digger, the role he plays, according to the source, in a serious fatsuit. The studio has repurposed the quote for a new online ad that directly addresses the film's poor critical reception. The ad's tagline: "SAME FILM – DIFFERENT TRUTH."

The pitch is straightforward. A provocative, passionate film like Digger is divisive, the campaign argues, and audiences should make up their own minds. As the source notes, that is true — though it is equally true of films that receive across-the-board raves, which rarely get ads celebrating the controversy.

Digger has drawn bad reviews, but it has also drawn plenty of good ones. The ad campaign chooses to frame the negative notices not as a verdict but as evidence of a film too bold for consensus. It is a risky posture: telling audiences to ignore critics only works if audiences believe the critics are the problem.

There is a cautionary precedent, and it is recent. Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis ran a similar campaign, rebranding the existence of bad reviews — despite that film also having its defenders — as proof of genius awaiting appreciation. That campaign collapsed when viewers noticed that the negative reviews quoted for Apocalypse Now and The Godfather had been fabricated, as The Guardian reported in August 2024. The studio pulled the trailer and apologized.

The Megalopolis debacle shows the specific danger of this strategy: it invites scrutiny. A campaign built on the claim that critics were wrong about past masterpieces collapses the moment one quote fails a fact-check. Digger's ad, at least as described, quotes Cruise's own character rather than manufacturing critical judgments, which keeps it on safer legal and factual ground. But the rhetorical move is the same — reframing rejection as a badge of artistic seriousness.

Whether audiences answer the call is another matter. "SAME FILM – DIFFERENT TRUTH" asks viewers to see the divide over Digger as a feature rather than a flaw, and to side with the film against its detractors. That worked for no one in recent memory; Megalopolis flopped. Cruise, whose star power has historically overcome mixed critical reactions, may be the one actor with the box-office capital to test the theory again.

The ad is running now. The verdict that matters — the audience's, not the critics' — will arrive at the box office.