Neil Young Praises ‘Digger’: ‘The Best Film I Have Ever Seen’ — SkimNews
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- Neil Young called the Tom Cruise film 'Digger' 'the best film I have ever seen' in the Letters/Artists/Bandstand section of his Neil Young Archives Times-Contrarian newspaper, criticizing critics for 'miss[ing] the overall effect' of director Alejandro González Iñárritu's work.
- 'Digger' holds a 53% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and had grossed roughly $38 million worldwide two weeks after its theatrical release, with Variety reporting it would need $350 million to break even.
- The film was the last released by Warner Bros. before its merger with Paramount, a fact Young cited as making it 'a great example of our times' and one he said reflected 'today's political and social world.'
- Hollywood supporters including Jane Fonda, Guillermo Del Toro, and Anne Hathaway — described as Cruise's Days of Thunder 2 co-star — have also publicly backed the film as it trended toward one of the biggest box office disasters in recent history.
- Young urged readers to 'forget' negative reviews before seeing the film, arguing it 'lives in a world of art' and was too full of 'artful expression and radical change-ups' for audiences expecting a commercial film.
Why it matters: Young is positioning himself as Digger's loudest champion at the precise moment the film is being judged a commercial catastrophe — his endorsement reframes a $38-million-grossing, $350-million-break-even picture from flopped product to misunderstood art, giving Paramount-Warner Bros. a cultural-tastemaker talking point just as the merged studio absorbs the loss.
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