How we lost our appetite for rich humor

Tom Cruise's latest film could lose $250m (£190m) - could one reason be that audiences are tired of Hollywood telling them what they already know about the super-rich? No one seems to be able to decide who should be more to blame for Digger's recent box office failure. Were these ousted Warner Bros. directors Mike De Luca and Pam Abdi that love?

No one seems to be able to decide who should be more to blame for Digger's recent box office failure.

Were these ousted Warner Bros. executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdi, whose love of big-budget auteur cinema usually came at a hefty price? Or was it the marketing team responsible for hiding the film's biggest swing of all the trailers, ensuring that many viewers remained alienated from its initial preview?

The honest answer is that the film's fate was sealed long before anyone could put a finger on its failure. Last year it became clear that audiences were tired of the well-worn cinematic trend that Digger is a part of: satire of the rich.

There was a brief moment when audiences couldn't get enough of rich movies, with the massive success of Parasite inspiring Hollywood to take its class themes and bring them to the West. The lasting fallout from the covid pandemic has brought issues of wealth inequality into greater focus, and titles as diverse as The Glass Onion, Salt Burns, The Triangle of Grief and The Menu all spoke to the zeitgeist with their distinctive and controversial exclusions from the 1%.

On the small screen, Succession and The White Lotus quickly grew their audiences after acclaimed first seasons, thanks to the promise of darkly comic social commentary skewering those at the top of the food chain. Audiences were more than ready to eat the rich, but their appetites were satiated long before Hollywood even thought about changing the menu.

Digger is the most high-profile victim of the trend currently underway, with some reports predicting it could lose $250m (£190m) during its theatrical release. It's easy to blame the divisive reviews and audience reactions, but perhaps it would have been better if audiences hadn't been bored with constant cinematic reminders of how much they've been duped by the rich and powerful.

The subject hasn't become less important, but interest in films that hold up a cracked mirror to this reality has waned. So far this year, two revenge action films pitting low-class heroes against the super-rich in fights to the death — Ready or Not 2 and They Will Kill You — have flopped at the box office, and even art audiences seem to have grown weary of this brand of topical satire, if not the fan base that Rosebush is getting.

On the small screen, the return of the anthology series Beef, which won awards and airplay in its first run, failed to register as it pivoted on this familiar satire, barely cracking Netflix's top 10 days and disappearing entirely.

Later this week, Roman Gavras' The Victim will hit Netflix without fanfare, more than a year after its long-awaited festival premiere ended with a bang. It's the story of shallow but self-absorbed celebrities at a fundraiser that's infiltrated by violent mobsters, activists who boast a cast including Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, and John Malkovich. This echoes many of the themes of the previously mentioned titles about the tension between the wealthy and their commitment to political causes. And even with the star-studded lineup and clear cultural relevance, it took months to find a distributor, and this paragraph might be the first you've heard of it.

The strangest thing about the death of this trend in movies is that many of its ideas are finding a more mainstream place. Even the most vanilla tax on higher earners is supported by 75% of Britons and a clear majority of 60% in the US, according to YouGov. People are openly critical of the ultra-rich, so it's strange that popular culture targeting their unsustainable lifestyles is met with fatigue.

We live in an age where the world's richest man is one of the most popular people, and the president of America's real estate giant continues to reach the bottom of the popularity ratings. Despite the not-so-secret allegiances of some studio heads—Skydance CEO David Ellison is an avid Trump supporter—Hollywood creatives know how unpopular these figures are with the public, and studios aren't shy about showing films with satirical affronts to whatever they represent politically and culturally. Why doesn't it sound anymore?

The most obvious explanation is sheer exhaustion. Doomscrolling has become a daily activity for millions of people, so why would anyone shell out money to see a movie that mocks the people responsible for the state of the world, when they could have something sharper and more topical on their timeline for free?

In an effort to speak to the times without the responsibility of reacting to more specific headlines, The Rich often ends up preaching the obvious, even if the sentiment remains relevant. It's Stuart Lee's routine about political satire - "Was it funny? No, but I agreed to the hell with it" - exploded on a blockbuster scale, and nobody's spending their hard-earned cash to politely check out a movie they're supposed to laugh at.

The irony of Digger being the last film released by Warner Bros as an independent studio is not lost, with the theme of billionaires trying to control the narrative, foreshadowing the arrival of a new studio owner keen to please the president.

If the worst assumptions about Ellison's studio takeover come true, and that a film of this nature could have been greenlit at this level, we may soon become nostalgic for this brand of film. Unfortunately, no amount of time will make this and other late-stage capitalist satires any less funny.