{"id":793268,"date":"2026-10-06T02:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T02:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/793268\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T02:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T02:26:09","slug":"as-digger-sinks-hollywoods-three-amigos-close-ranks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/793268\/","title":{"rendered":"As ‘Digger’ Sinks, Hollywood’s Three Amigos Close Ranks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAs Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu<\/a>\u2019s Digger<\/a> entered a box-office death spiral<\/a>, two familiar defenders appeared.<\/p>\n

\n\tGuillermo del Toro<\/a> blasted as \u201centirely petty\u201d<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tAlfonso Cuar\u00f3n, meanwhile, posted<\/a> a series<\/a> of old critical pans<\/a> of a number of films whose regard grew exponentially, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Metropolis and The Shining among them.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt looked like two members of the Mexican filmmaking triumvirate long ago christened \u201cthe Three Amigos\u201d closing ranks around the third. In fact, they have been doing some version of this for nearly three decades.<\/p>\n

\n\tLong before the Oscars and nine-figure budgets, Cuar\u00f3n, del Toro and I\u00f1\u00e1rritu became each other\u2019s private critics, advisers and occasional unofficial editors, quietly shaping films from Amores Perros and Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n to Gravity, Birdman and Crimson Peak.<\/p>\n

\n\tCuar\u00f3n and del Toro met in Mexico\u2019s film and television world in the late 1980s, most famously around Televisa\u2019s Twilight Zone-like anthology La Hora Marcada, whose orbit also included future three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel \u201cChivo\u201d Lubezki.<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u00f1\u00e1rritu came from a different world. He made his name in Mexico City radio before moving into advertising and directing. He met Cuar\u00f3n in the mid-1990s, when Cuar\u00f3n was already working in Hollywood, and has described him as an early mentor.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe trio really took shape around Amores Perros. Cuar\u00f3n encouraged I\u00f1\u00e1rritu to show his 2000 debut to del Toro, who according to a 2006 Los Angeles Times<\/a> profile watched it, called I\u00f1\u00e1rritu 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 I\u00f1\u00e1rritu over the edit.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt established a pattern. Over the years, the three became trusted sounding boards on one another\u2019s films. For a time they even formalized the relationship, creating Cha Cha Cha Films in 2007 and striking a production deal with Universal.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy 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\u2019s roughly $20 million The Shape of Water approached $200 million. <\/p>\n

\n\tTheir budgets rose, and the bets paid off. Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s $100 million-plus Gravity grossed roughly $700 million, while I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s notoriously difficult $135 million The Revenant made more than $530 million.<\/p>\n

\n\tHollywood rewarded them accordingly. Beginning with Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s win for Gravity in 2014, the Three Amigos won the directing Oscar an astounding five times in six years: Cuar\u00f3n twice, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu twice and del Toro once. <\/p>\n

\n\tThree friends from Mexico had come close to monopolizing Hollywood\u2019s highest directing honor.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow there is Digger.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt is I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s first Hollywood studio film since The Revenant. He returned to Mexico in between for 2022\u2019s intensely personal, Spanish-language Bardo \u2014 a Netflix release that was similarly divisive \u2014 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tHe 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 I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s biggest Hollywood swing since The Revenant. This time, the gamble didn\u2019t pay off.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat Digger means for I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, 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\u2019s similarly ambitious Mickey 17, another $100 million-plus Warner Bros. bet on an Oscar-winning international auteur, struggled at the box office. <\/p>\n

\n\tArriving 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor nearly 30 years, Cuar\u00f3n and del Toro have been among the few people willing to tell I\u00f1\u00e1rritu when they think he\u2019s gotten something wrong. With Digger, they became two of the loudest voices insisting everyone else had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s Digger entered a box-office death spiral, two familiar defenders appeared. Guillermo del Toro blasted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":793269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[229702,126697,6491,184230,96,18004,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-793268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-alejandro-g-iu00f1u00e1rritu","tag-alfonso-cuaron","tag-celebrities","tag-digger","tag-entertainment","tag-guillermo-del-toro","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/793269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}