Ben Affleck fears Tom Cruise's Digger flop means samey films — he sold Netflix an AI company
Reddit has a one-line reply to his defence of risky cinema, and it comes with a $587 million price tag. On Digger itself, though, he may have a point.
Ben Affleck has worked out who is to blame if cinema turns beige: the people who didn't buy a ticket for Digger. On Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast on 12 October 2026, he called the gloating over Tom Cruise's box office bomb "a little bit like the high school bullying thing". On 16 October The Hollywood Reporter put the warning back in the headlines, and readers looked harder at the man making it.
"If you punish movies that take risks, guess what you're going to get? A bunch of sh***y homogenized movies."
— Ben Affleck, on Happy Sad Confused
The film he is defending, Alejandro González Iñárritu's climate satire, opened on 2 October to $8 million in North America and had $35.3 million worldwide after its second weekend. Variety's sources put the budget at $160–180 million, plus around $100 million on marketing, and the expected loss at $245 million.
Says the man who sold Netflix an AI company
Reddit answered in one line. "Says the man who just sold his AI company to Netflix," reads one of the top comments in the r/Fauxmoi thread. On r/entertainment, the top reply went further: "He helped make the problems and then preaches."
The company is InterPositive, which Affleck founded in 2022. The timeline:
- 5 March 2026: Netflix announces it has bought InterPositive, without a price. Affleck joins the streamer as a senior adviser, and the 16-person team moves in-house.
- July 2026: a Netflix filing puts the total purchase price at about $587 million, in cash.
- 9 October 2026: Affleck's own thriller Animals arrives on Netflix. At Bloomberg's Screentime event he admitted AI was used "for lots of things" in it, then refused to say where, because a magician doesn't explain the trick.
To be fair, InterPositive doesn't conjure films out of a text box. It trains a model on a production's own dailies to help with relighting, visual effects and missing shots, and Affleck insists Animals is "a very human movie".
Read more: Tom Cruise's Digger is losing $245 million, and I'd bet it's the next Fight Club
Even the most upvoted comment in the Fauxmoi thread agrees with him and sticks the knife in at once: "He is correct and he may make a few of them for streaming."
Who is actually making films samey
On Digger itself, Affleck has a point. A studio that loses $245 million on an original film by an Oscar-winning director will think twice before funding the next one. Cheering a bomb like this is how you end up with another decade of reboots.
But audiences are not refusing to take risks. They just refused this one. This year Obsession, an original horror film reportedly made for under $1 million, became Focus Features' biggest domestic hit, and A24's Backrooms opened to $81.5 million on a $10 million budget, a record for the studio. Digger had Cruise in old-age prosthetics, a nine-figure budget and a campaign that told people very little about what the film actually was.
If films start to look the same, I'd blame the companies buying tools to finish them faster and cheaper before the people who skipped Digger.
That's my view, not a charge sheet. Still, a lecture on homogenised cinema lands differently from a man who spent this year selling Netflix a way to make films more efficiently. He won't even say what the AI did on Animals.
Animals is streaming now. Digger will reach home viewers sooner or later, and may yet find the audience Affleck thinks it deserves. The argument for risky films is a good one. It just needs a spokesman who didn't sell a streamer an AI company for $587 million this year.
Read more: After Digger flopped, Tom Cruise wants to race real stock cars for Days of Thunder 2