Digger and the Early Screening Wave: Same Film, Different Truth?

Warner Bros. sold Digger with its own controversy. A teaser set one critic calling it unpleasant against another calling it a masterpiece, and closed on the line "Same film, different truth." Then Page Six reported that influencers who saw it early were calling it a masterpiece and predicting an Oscar for Tom Cruise, while critics split and the reported worldwide opening came in around $20 million.

Updated October 13, 2026: the early-screening reactions were rescored with our film scorer after being moved into their own group, which raised their median from 82 to 90, and Digger's Verdict has since moved from 70 to 73. The numbers below are current as of October 13.

We cannot tell you whether Digger is a masterpiece. We can answer a narrower question with data: did the creators who saw it before release react differently from the creators who bought a ticket?

Three groups, one film

Reactr reads creator reaction videos on YouTube and scores what each creator actually said, on a 1 to 100 scale. For Digger, those videos fall into three groups.

Group	When	Creators	Score
Reacting to the trailers (Reactr Rating)	April to September	49	79
Saw it at an early screening (median)	September 22 to 29	4	90
Saw it after release (Reactr Verdict)	October 2 onward	10	73

The early group ran warmest by a distance, and all four were enthusiastic: SWAYNAMI scored 94, Film Threat 91, Oscar Film Forecast 89 and Kristian Harloff 81. The creators who saw it after it opened came in 6 points below the trailer, inside the normal margin, so the Verdict reads "Delivered on the trailer." Between the early crowd and the paying crowd, the gap is 17 points.

The early voices were also the loudest

The bigger difference is reach. The four early-screening reactions have about 300,000 views between them. The ten creators who reacted after release have about 4,000 combined, and most of them have a few hundred views or fewer. If you followed Digger on YouTube in late September, the early wave is most of what you saw. The audience that paid has barely been heard.

Is the early wave just hype? A little, and Digger a lot

We looked at every film on Reactr with at least three early-screening reactions and a published Verdict: 14 films. The early crowd tends to run a little warmer than the audience that follows, by a median of 2 points. Five of the fourteen land within five points of each other, and on three the early crowd was cooler, including Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, where the paying audience liked the film even more.

Film	Early screenings	Verdict	Gap
Digger	90	73	+17
Forgotten Island	90	73	+17
Passenger	96	79	+17
Hope	88	74	+14
Five films, including Primetime and The End of Oak Street			within 5
Practical Magic 2	79	89	−10

So the early wave leans warm, but on most films it is still a fair preview of what audiences will say. Digger is one of three films where it ran seventeen points warmer than the people who saw it after it opened, the widest gap we have measured, and that is what makes it worth a closer look.

What this does not say

• It does not say anyone was paid or told what to say. We do not know who was invited to which screening or on what terms. We know when each video was posted and what the creator said in it.
• The samples are small. Four early reactions and ten paid ones. A few more videos on either side could move these numbers.
• The groups are different kinds of channel. Early access tends to go to bigger channels. The post-release group is mostly small creators, who may simply grade differently.

What we changed

Until today, a reaction posted before release was filed as a trailer reaction, because that is what nearly all of them are. Digger showed us the exception: creators reacting to the film itself, from a screening, days before it opened. Those reactions are not about the trailer, and they are not from people who bought a ticket, so they now count toward neither number. Every title's page lists them as their own group, with their median, so anyone can compare the three. Digger's trailer Rating moved from 80 to 79 when its early-screening reactions came out of it. The methodology page explains the rule.