The entertainment industry faces many challenges these days. Corporate consolidation, artificial intelligence, home theaters, and escalating costs all threaten to either change or damage the industry. Hollywood and its activists keep demanding protection from these economic dangers, always at the expense of their consumers and sometimes at the expense of taxpayers.
However, Hollywood refuses to confront the true existential threat that it faces: soulless nihilism.
For many years, conservatives have complained about the narratives and messaging from America's entertainment industry, and for good reason. While art has always had some involvement in politics, either by reflecting them or as advocacy and activism, the politicization of entertainment into progressive-elite didactics has intensified in recent decades. Not only has Hollywood leaned heavily into partisanized messaging, it has also rewarded it – with money, awards, fawning press, and celebrity social climbing.
That brings us to Digger and its star, the controversial-yet-bankable Tom Cruise.
By all measures, Cruise has made himself into an icon in Hollywood, largely by avoiding most of its politics. His action films do monster business at the box office, and even his occasional forays into drama and comedy do well with audiences. His direct appeal and gratitude to cinemagoers after the pandemic for Top Gun: Maverick created an enormous amount of goodwill for both Cruise and the industry. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) awarded Cruise an honorary Oscar this year for these and other contributions to the industry.
Still, Cruise understandably wants to win an acting Oscar before his nearly half-century run ends. He has been nominated three times: Jerry Maguire, Born on the Fourth of July, and Magnolia, for his supporting role. That was his last nomination, more than 25 years ago. While Cruise practically prints cash for Hollywood, the Academy routinely ignores his work, preferring to reward those who boost the narratives that Hollywood embraces.
The only way the Academy will take Cruise seriously is if he plays the Academy's game. And again, that brings us to Digger and its obvious ambitions for Oscar season.
If you have not already read Christian Toto's review of the film, be sure to do so, and take note that even many of the establishment critics agree with his assessment. Christian reports that Digger literally shouts its message at the audience, not in a fun way but in a "the beatings will continue until morale improves" manner. At least The Day After Tomorrow lectured its audience without blowing out their eardrums, although its global-warming-leads-to-Ice-Age didacticism was transmitted with such a heavy hand that it might have caused Soviet propagandists to blush. (It even managed to scold Americans for immigration enforcement, while making Temu Cheney the villain of the entire Ice Age. Truly awful.)
For a Hollywood icon who rebuilt his brand based on humble appreciation of his audience, this is an epic reversal. Cruise apparently wants that statue so badly that he's willing to sell out his fans and force them to listen to a ferocious and incompetent lecture on a topic that Hollywood has already exhausted. Be careful what you wish for, indeed.
Of course, one bad film does not an existential threat make. Digger doesn't come to the theaters as an exception, however. My friend John Nolte notices a pattern emerging in Oscar-bait season, a pattern in which major releases take aim at not just traditional values, but rational values. John argues that Hollywood's nihilism will push the industry toward the existential crisis that most frightens its progressive-elite power players the most:
Today's Hollywood Values....
— John Ocasio-Rodham Nolte (@NolteNC) October 1, 2026
PRIMETIME demonizes the reporter trying to stop child rapists.
SOCIAL RECKONING demonizes corporations for not censoring political speech and opinions.
DIGGER attacks everyday people for using oil to better their lives.
When these people tell… https://t.co/N6J9NDYR1Q
When these people tell you who they are through their "art," believe them.
AI will soon end the bottleneck on entertainment production held by the fascist left. Normal People will soon be allowed to make entertainment for Normal People with the same production values.
I can't wait.
Christian and I discussed all three films in our most recent Off the Beaten Path episode as well, but John more efficiently connects the dots. In his next VIP post tonight, Christian blasts Sorkin for his sudden free-speech hypocrisy, selling out his previous cinematic defense of the First Amendment in The American President in order to side with government censorship and speech suppression in The Social Reckoning.
The most mystifying – or perhaps the least mystifying, in one sense – is making a biopic about veteran reporter Chris Hansen and making him into a villain for exposing predators targeting children. Hollywood has a long and dirty history of child abuse and covering it up; the entertainment industry championed child rapist Roman Polanski for decades, until Harvey Weinstein's predation made it too uncomfortable to continue, and that's just one example. It's beyond bizarre that Primetime takes the position that Hansen is the real problem, and not the dozens or hundreds of predators that his and other efforts have exposed and caught.
Hollywood has long chosen sides in politics. Now, however, they are choosing predators over victims, censorship over speech, and after the October 7 massacres, largely choosing terrorists over the one liberal democracy in the Middle East that actually protects lesbians and gays rather than toss them off roofs. Hollywood is choosing nihilism, death, and disgrace at every turn.
And until now, these gatekeepers have largely prevented others from accessing resources that would allow competition in that marketplace. If AI is Hollywood's apocalypse, then its progressive power elite are throwing every effort into forcing that apocalypse into reality.
Hollywood is Digger–ing its own grave.
