Britain’s Daily Mail says the new Warner Brothers movie “Digger,” which features Tom Cruise as a rapacious oil baron who provokes a climate disaster, “is on course to be the biggest box office flop of all time.” Its estimated global box office is set to top out at $50 million. It needs $350 million globally to break even.

Climate change disaster movies used to attract big audiences. The Day After Tomorrow, a 2004 film based in part on an Al Gore fever dream about New York covered by an ice sheet, made a huge profit. In 2021, Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was a clever comedy and broke Netflix download records.

(We thought the asteroid plunging into the earth was a symbol of the national debt, not climate change.)

Perhaps voters have caught up with the decades of exaggerated predictions of climate change. Perhaps we’ve come to value affordable and reliable energy.

Or perhaps the best explanation for the public’s disdain for this flop comes from Ross Clark in the British Spectator: “We can live without Hollywood movies, but not without the oil industry.”

We wonder whether Paramount has second thoughts about purchasing Warner Brothers.

As for Tom Cruise: does he have any idea how much fuel those jet fighters and race cars he loves driving actually use?