As ‘Digger’ Sinks, Hollywood’s Three Amigos Circle the Wagons

As Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger entered a box-office death spiral, two familiar defenders appeared. Guillermo del Toro blasted as “entirely petty” an IGN post suggesting moviegoers save their money and wait to stream the Tom Cruise vehicle, whose budget has been estimated as high as $180 million, praising Digger instead for its ambition and theatrical scale. Alfonso Cuarón, meabnwhile, posted a series of old critical pans of a number of films whose regard grew exponentially, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Metropolis and The Shining among them. It looked like two members of the Mexican filmmaking triumvirate long ago christened “the Three Amigos” circling the wagons around the third. In fact, they have been doing some version of this for nearly three decades. Long before the Oscars and nine-figure budgets, Cuarón, del Toro and Iñárritu became each other’s private critics, advisers and occasional unofficial editors, quietly shaping films from Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También to Gravity, Birdman and Crimson Peak. Cuarón and del Toro met in Mexico’s film and television world in the late 1980s, most famously around Televisa’s Twilight Zone-like anthology La Hora Marcada, whose orbit also included future three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki. Iñárritu came from a different world. He made his name in Mexico City radio before moving into advertising and directing. He met Cuarón in the mid-1990s, when Cuarón was already working in Hollywood, and has described him as an early mentor. The trio really took shape around Amores Perros. Cuarón encouraged Iñárritu to show his 2000 debut to del Toro, who according to a 2006 Los Angeles Times profile watched it, called Iñárritu early in the morning and told him two things: He had made a masterpiece, and it was too long. Soon del Toro was in Mexico City arguing with Iñárritu over the edit. It established a pattern. Over the years, the three became trusted sounding boards on one another’s films. For a time they even formalized the relationship, creating Cha Cha Cha Films in 2007 and striking a production deal with Universal. By then, the friends were becoming Hollywood powers, producing a series of films both intensely personal and enormously profitable. Birdman, made for roughly $18 million, grossed more than $100 million worldwide. Del Toro’s roughly $20 million The Shape of Water approached $200 million. Their budgets rose, and the bets paid off. Cuarón’s $100 million-plus Gravity grossed roughly $700 million, while Iñárritu’s notoriously difficult $135 million The Revenant made more than $530 million. Hollywood rewarded them accordingly. Beginning with Cuarón’s win for Gravity in 2014, the Three Amigos won the directing Oscar an astounding five times in six years: Cuarón twice, Iñárritu twice and del Toro once. Three friends from Mexico had come close to monopolizing Hollywood’s highest directing honor. Now there is Digger. It is Iñárritu’s first Hollywood studio film since The Revenant. He returned to Mexico in between for 2022’s intensely personal, Spanish-language Bardo — a Netflix release that was similarly divisive — but has said the idea for Digger came in the aftermath of The Revenant and took a full ten years to bring to the screen. He began writing it with Mexican playwright and screenwriter Sabina Berman in 2017 and approached Cruise years before cameras finally rolled. With Cruise, the decade-in-the-making project finally got its green light, along with its massive budget. It was Iñárritu’s biggest Hollywood swing since The Revenant. This time, the gamble didn’t pay off. What Digger means for Iñárritu, or for the extraordinary run of Hollywood success enjoyed by the Three Amigos, remains to be seen. But its failure comes just a year after Bong Joon Ho’s similarly ambitious Mickey 17, another $100 million-plus Warner Bros. bet on an Oscar-winning international auteur, struggled at the box office. Arriving as the far safer Paramount subsumes Warner Bros., it may be a very long time before Hollywood places another nine-figure wager of this kind. For nearly 30 years, Cuarón and del Toro have been among the few people willing to tell Iñárritu when they think he’s gotten something wrong. With Digger, they became two of the loudest voices insisting everyone else had.