Remember “shovel-ready”?
Back during the Obama years, that was Washington’s favorite description for projects supposedly ready to receive great piles of money and immediately get to work. Years later, Hollywood may finally have perfected the concept.
Meet Digger: perhaps the first genuinely shovel-ready movie. It arrived with the shovel, found the hole and, judging by the reported opening-weekend box office, immediately began digging its own grave. And digging. And digging. By the time the accountants finish measuring the excavation, they may need geological equipment.
Hollywood has produced legendary box-office bombs before, but the early numbers being reported for Digger put it in rather special territory. When a studio combines a massive production budget, an enormous promotional campaign, one of the world’s biggest movie stars and thousands of theater screen and still produces an opening weekend resembling a rounding error against the investment, you have something worth examining.
The interesting question is no longer whether Digger bombed. It is how deep the hole goes.
So grab a hard hat. We’re going underground.
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