A portion of the internet has been having a good time recently, imagining it has uncovered a secret musical behind the curious trailers for Tom Cruise’s upcoming black comedy, Digger. One trailer even showed the 64-year-old actor atop a rotating platform, while other background characters appeared open-mouthed, as though mid-song. Clearly a musical, the internet proposed!Well, no. Apparently not. Variety, citing sources “familiar with the production,” says Digger is not actually a movie musical. Time to pack up the conspiracy and go home, eh? Find something else to read far too much into.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Still, I reckon it’s a shame that Digger hasn’t turned out to be a musical. We simply don’t get enough of them these days. Aside from Disney’s family films, trotting out the kind of toe-tapping tunes that will haunt your days until one of your kids’ toys, low on batteries, slowly garbles “whaaaat caaan I saaaay except yoooou’re welcooooooome!” for a 9,000th and hopefully final time, Hollywood movie musicals are pretty thin on the ground. When they do pop up, they tend to be stage-to-screen projects and do quite well at the box office. I don’t need to tell you that the recent Wicked films raked in a ton of money. But it’s much rarer to see an original movie musical take off at the multiplex. In fact, only a few come to mind from the last 10 years, such as La La Land and The Greatest Showman, and perhaps 2023’s Wonka, which was still based on a known IP and also one of a handful of films that hid their musical components in pre-release marketing, lest people shy away from buying tickets.Why go to such lengths when audiences have historically loved movie musicals? And where are the other big, original live-action musicals of the 2020s? Did the tragic fate of DC’s rather more jukebox affair, Joker: Folie à Deux, really make that much of an impact on Hollywood’s efforts to try to be a little more ambitious about these things, targeting remakes and sure things from the stage instead?It’s all a bit baffling because so many people love films where the stars break into song and dance at the drop of a hat. Movie musicals became a Hollywood staple for that very reason, and audiences have often turned out for a decent splash of whimsy. Even smaller movies that arguably flopped on release can achieve cult status given enough time, as any Labyrinth or Phantom of the Paradise fan will tell you.So, yes. Say what you will, it might have actually been fun to see Tom Cruise, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemons sing and dance in Digger. The quasi-mysterious plot, which seems to be that a very wealthy man has done bad things and wants everyone to think he’s humanity’s savior rather than their destroyer, could have potentially been a lot wilder with some good tunes. And director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who has gained a reputation as a filmmaker who loves exploring the human condition, might have pulled off quite the coup by getting Cruise back into the musical game after he dipped his toe in the 2012 flop Rock of Ages.Yet, whether Digger turns out to be a disappointment or not, there’ll always be the opportunity to adapt it into a stage musical later on. Maybe then we’ll see what was going on in the collective minds of the internet’s sleuths in the month before the film’s release.Digger will be released on October 2.The post They’re Saying Digger Isn’t a Musical and That’s a Shame appeared first on Den of Geek.