Why Ben Affleck refuses to hit Digger

For him, rejoicing in this failure risks encouraging Hollywood to produce ever more formatted films.

Ben Affleck comes to Tom Cruise’s aid.

While Digger by Alejandro González Iñárritu is shaping up to be one of the biggest flops of the year, the actor and director calls for not condemning a film simply because it took risks. In his eyes, making fun of his commercial failure amounts to sending a very bad signal to the studios:

“There’s a little side of bullying in high school… There are people who make fun of it even though they haven’t even seen the film. We see this more and more today with lots of films and therefore with Digger. Everyone wants to celebrate this business failure as if it were the most exciting event ever. However, we can also say to ourselves: it is a rather ambitious and interesting film, made by talented and captivating people…“

Ben Affleck is no stranger to setbacks at the box office.

And he believes that the reactions provoked by Digger could have much broader consequences than the simple fate of a film:

“Everyone only thinks about counting money, financial losses, that kind of thing. For my part, I just say to myself: if you sanction films that take risks, guess what will happen? You will only have a bunch of mediocre and formatted films! You can’t create something interesting without taking big risks. And that sometimes means suffering a setback.“

In short, if Hollywood draws the wrong lessons from the failure of Diggerstudios risk further favoring already known franchises and intellectual properties, to the detriment of original projects that try to think outside the box.

That being said, the latest projections point to an industrial accident that risks costing Warner Bros. nearly $245 million, one of the most expensive commercial failures in the studio’s history. Ben Affleck knows: his Live by Nightin 2016, caused the same studio to lose around $70 million.