Ben Affleck is the latest celebrity to stick up for Tom Cruise s Digger amid its disastrous box office run, but he's doing so by warning moviegoers what exactly their trashing of the movie will result in. Mainly, publicly bashing Digger will only lead the major Hollywood studios to make shitty movies that don't stand out from each other (aka more IP and franchise fare). It's a little bit like the high-school bullying thing, with people who hadn't even seen movies. You see it happening now, frankly, with Digger,' Affleck said. Everybody wants to celebrate this bomb as if it's the most exciting thing to happen. And you think like, it's a pretty ambitious, interesting movie made by interesting people who have talent. Popular on Variety Everybody wants to count the money, what it lost or whatever. To me, I just think, if you punish movies that take risks, guess what you're going to get? A bunch of shitty homogenized movies, he continued. You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing. And that means you're going to sometimes look bad. Affleck has weathered his own box office flops over the course of his decades-long career. Digger, from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, stars Cruis as an oil tycoon who is faced with the end of the world after one of his rigs in Antartica malfunctions and sends ice caps hurtling towards Europe. The movie strongly divided critics (53% on Rotten Tomatoes) and has only earned $15 million at the domestic box office since opening Oct. 2. With a production budget north of $160 million and a marketing budget pegged at $100 million, Digger would need to earn $350 million just to break even in theaters. The latest report from Variety has Digger loosing Warner Bros. around $245 million, making it one of the most costly flops in studio history. Amid the movie's unfortunate box office run, various Hollywood celebrities and industry names have rallied around Cruise and the movie. Neil Young recently posted on his website that Digger is the best film I have ever seen. None of the reviews I have read describe this film adequately #variety #podcastdailynews