Don’t hate the movie, hate the critic! Digger’s new PR push is a risky bet for film that was never meant to be divisive

‘SAME FILM – DIFFERENT TRUTH’ is the marketing solution for the film’s poor reception by critics. Or, as Cruise says in the ad, ‘Fuck those people!’ ‘You know what? Fuck those people!” The speaker is Tom Cruise in his serious-fatsuit role of Digger, in the bold new online ad which gives the finger to his film’s bad reviews and the haters. His words are now repurposed to address loathsome critics. The ad’s message is that a provocative, passionate film like this is divisive. You should make your own mind up. Which is true of course. Although it is just as true for films getting across-the-board raves.The last movie to try this was Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: it too ran an ad campaign rebranding the existence of bad reviews (though like Digger it also had plenty of good reviews) as evidence of genius which had yet to be appreciated. This campaign went terribly wrong when it was pointed out that bad reviews it had quoted for Apocalypse Now and The Godfather were in fact made up. Continue reading...