Digger digs a hole at the box office
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, the celebrated Mexican director’s first Hollywood studio film since The Revenant (2015), has opened to dismal box-office returns despite Tom Cruise’s star power. Reviews are swinging from “Even Tom Cruise Can’t Save This Strained Satire” to “This Tom Cruise Masterpiece Will Stand the Test of Time”.
The film is a satire about climate change and corporate power starring Cruise as an unrepentant oilman. It took in an estimated US$8 million across more than 3,000 locations in its opening weekend, according to The New York Times, and audiences gave it a C grade on CinemaScore. Warner Bros. puts the budget at US$125 million, but others estimate it at US$150 million or more, partly because production stalled after John Goodman was injured in a fall on set. With nearly US$100 million more spent on marketing, the studio could lose between US$125 million and US$150 million, making Digger one of the year’s biggest box-office flops.
Digger was the last film Warner Bros. released as a standalone studio before its acquisition by Paramount closed on 6 October, capping a year in which none of its releases has passed US$100 million at the box office. A film consultant quoted by The New York Times noted that Paramount has little recent history of big auteur-driven films, and The Hollywood Reporter suggests it may be a long time before Hollywood places another nine-figure bet of this kind.
Iñárritu, 63, says he conceived the film while shooting The Revenant, when his crew found that the ice they needed had vanished from locations where that had never happened before. He developed it with Mexican playwright, screenwriter and journalist Sabina Berman. She told AP she had wanted to write about climate change after noticing its toll on people, and found in Iñárritu the ideal accomplice. The pair began writing in Los Angeles almost a decade ago, and later sailed through the Arctic with cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki to see the colossal icebergs for themselves. Berman, who is also one of the film’s producers, says her theatre background made it clear early on that the characters would talk endlessly, using words to control the narrative while the world collapses around them.
Iñárritu told The New York Times the project collapsed three times, costing him three years of his life. As climate events overtook the script, he said, the process came to feel “almost like writing a documentary about the future”. He acknowledges the film is polarising, but says he prefers that to a lukewarm reception.
Critics in the Spanish-speaking world are also divided. In El País, veteran Spanish critic Carlos Boyero called Digger the most pretentious, hysterical and foolish film of the year. In Mexico, Ivana Lamas of La Crónica de Hoy admitted dozing off for ten minutes, adding that Digger had the courtesy not to move on much while she slept. The Mexican outlet Grupo Animal was more sympathetic, noting that the film debuted at 51 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest score of Iñárritu’s career on the site but considered whether US critics struggle to accept a satire of their country, their president and their elite, especially one made by a Mexican.
The mixed reception has also prompted a show of solidarity from Iñárritu’s fellow Mexican directors. Guillermo del Toro called an IGN post advising audiences to wait for the streaming release “entirely petty”, and praised the film’s ambition. Alfonso Cuarón posted early critical pans of films later regarded as classics, among them Blade Runner and The Shining.
The “Three Amigos” have been each other’s critics and unofficial editors for nearly 30 years. Cuarón and del Toro met in Mexican television in the late 1980s; Iñárritu, who came from radio and advertising, met Cuarón in the mid-1990s. Del Toro famously told Iñárritu that Amores Perros (2000) was a masterpiece but too long. The trio formed Cha Cha Cha Films in 2007, with a production deal at Universal. Between 2014 and 2019 they won the Academy Award for best director five times in six years: Cuarón and Iñárritu twice each, del Toro once.
En el camino sweeps the 68th Ariel Awards
David Pablos’s En el camino was the big winner at the 68th Ariel Awards, Mexico’s highest film honours, taking six prizes including Best Picture from 13 nominations. The ceremony, organised by the Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas (AMACC) which marked its 80th anniversary this year, returned to Mexico City’s Estudios Churubusco after three editions in Jalisco. Already selected as Mexico’s entry for the 2027 Oscars, the film follows Veneno, a young man who survives by seducing truck drivers at roadside diners, as he enters the hypermasculine world of northern Mexico’s highways alongside a trucker called Muñeco.
Pablos shared Best Director with Pablo Pérez Lombardini, whose La reserva also won Best First Feature and Best Original Score. En el camino swept the male acting categories: Osvaldo Sánchez won Best Actor for his role as the trucker, Mariano López Sosa took Best Supporting Actor and Víctor Miguel Prieto Simental won Best Breakthrough Performance. Ximena Amann’s cinematography completed the film’s haul.
The surprise of the night was José Manuel Craviotto’s rowdy Autos, mota y rocanrol, which dominated the craft categories with awards for production design, costume, make-up and sound, plus a shared prize for visual effects.
Diana Sedano was named Best Actress for Juana, the directing debut of actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, and dedicated the award to investigative journalists. Ángeles Cruz won Best Supporting Actress for Rodrigo García’s Las locuras; for both actresses, it was a first Ariel.
Gabriel Mascaro’s O último azul won for original screenplay and editing, while Jimena Montemayor Loyo took the adapted screenplay award for Mujeres del alba, based on the book by Carlos Montemayor. Soy Frankelda, by brothers Arturo and Rodolfo Ambriz Rendón, won Best Animated Feature; Santiago Esteinou’s La libertad de Fierro won Best Documentary Feature; and Colombia’s Un poeta, directed by Simón Mesa Soto, was named Best Ibero-American Film.
Among the shorts, Las voces del despeñadero, a 23-minute black-and-white documentary about the cliff divers of La Quebrada in Acapulco, won Best Documentary Short. The award makes co-director Víctor Rejón Cruz the first filmmaker from Yucatán to win an Ariel as director; he shares the credit with Irving Serrano. The film had already won prizes at the Guadalajara and Morelia film festivals.
The federal Culture Ministry released a statement noting that 29 of the 49 nominated films had received public funding through programmes such as FOCINE and the EFICINE tax incentive, and that ten won 22 awards between them. Culture Secretary Claudia Curiel de Icaza said the role of public institutions was to create the conditions for more stories to be made and to reach audiences.
France takes centre stage in Guanajuato
The 54th Festival Internacional Cervantino opened in Guanajuato on 3 October and runs until 18 October, with France as guest of honour to mark 200 years of diplomatic relations with Mexico. According to the state government, 3,325 artists from 29 countries and 20 Mexican states are taking part, 1,400 of them from Guanajuato.
American singer and songwriter Mike Patton opened the festival with Mondo Cane at the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, leading a 25-piece ensemble through 90 minutes of reimagined Italian pop from the 1950s and 1960s. After the crowd spent much of the night calling for Juan Gabriel, Patton obliged with ‘Hasta que te conocí’, backed by Mariachi Gama 1000.
France has brought theatre, dance, circus, electronic music and co-productions with Mexican artists. Rachid Ouramdane’s Vértigo set the tone on opening day with aerial acrobatics over the city’s streets, performed by the Chaillot company alongside local performers.
The visual arts programme comprises 49 exhibitions in 35 venues across eight municipalities, plus 35 independent spaces. In León, the Museo de Arte e Historia de Guanajuato hosts the French group show En busca de lo imposible and La importancia del dibujo, the first retrospective of architect Bernardo Gómez-Pimienta. In the city of Guanajuato, Puntos suspendidos en el espacio at the Museo Palacio de los Poderes arranges some 50 pan-American prints from the 1970s and 1980s, by artists including Carlos Cruz-Diez and Juan Soriano, as an astronaut’s logbook of imaginary planets. The Buscadoras Guanajuato collective presents Retazos de vida, using embroidery as resistance against forgetting, at the Museo de Arte Olga Costa-José Chávez Morado.
Other highlights include Tosca from the Compañía Nacional de Ópera, Grupo Niche, the Compañía Antonio Gades, tenor Arturo Chacón’s tribute to José Alfredo Jiménez and a 30th-anniversary staging of Sabina Berman’s Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda.
The Circuito Cervantino takes programming to 16 other states, while community strands include Proyecto Ruelas in Salamanca and León, Más allá del honor, made with people in the state prison system, and Identidad viva, bringing 15 municipalities to the Plazuela de San Roque.
Bigger numbers, tighter budgets: Culture at the two-year mark
Mexico’s federal Culture Ministry held 520,000 activities across all 32 states in the first two years of the Sheinbaum administration, a 32 per cent increase in its cultural offering, reaching 50 million people, a 13 per cent rise in attendance. Culture Secretary Claudia Curiel de Icaza presented the results at the president’s morning press conference on 2 October.
The headline figure was an investment of 1.85 billion pesos in public arts schools run by INAH, INBAL, the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC) and the Orquesta Escuela Carlos Chávez, which Curiel described as unprecedented in 40 years (the president’s annual report puts the plan at 1.5 billion pesos, a discrepancy Proceso noted has not been explained). The ministry renovated 2,352 spaces and abolished enrolment fees.
The CCC’s enrolment has risen 250 per cent since it moved to the Escuelas de Artes y Oficios in Chapultepec, where INBAL’s Arsenal opened with 3,800 students, and the Orquesta Escuela Carlos Chávez has its own premises for the first time in 37 years.
Grants and incentives for artists rose 45 per cent, from 1.84 billion to 2.658 billion pesos, through 250 open calls reaching more than 180,000 artists. However, the annual report’s statistical annexes paint a less expansive picture: Proceso found that the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales (formerly FONCA) awarded 1,473 grants, less than half the 3,092 reported a year earlier.
In the past two years, 5,686 archaeological, historical and ethnographic items have been repatriated in collaboration with the Foreign Ministry, bringing the total since 2018 to some 17,000, which the ministry says is ten times the figure under previous governments.
More than 2,600 ministry employees, among the lowest paid in public administration according to Curiel, received a 17 per cent pay rise following union protests earlier in the year, though some 8,000 workers hired as contractors are not covered.
The sector is pressing for more. On 28 September the Asamblea de Artes, a coalition of 16 arts organisations and unions, called under the slogan “No more cuts to the cut” for the 2027 culture budget to rise at least in line with inflation, to a minimum of 15.5 billion pesos. The draft budget’s 15.86 billion pesos already clears that bar, but its other demand, redirecting spending from large projects and administration towards direct support for artists and communities, cuts against a draft in which INAH and INBAL face real-terms falls while the ministry’s administrative unit would grow more than thirtyfold. The coalition also claims 97.9 per cent of the culture budget is concentrated in Mexico City.
Juan Villoro wins the Carlos Fuentes Prize
Juan Villoro has been awarded the 2026 Premio Internacional Carlos Fuentes a la Creación Literaria en el Idioma Español, given by Mexico’s federal Culture Ministry and UNAM. The jury, which included last year’s winner Gioconda Belli, praised the breadth of writing that spans several genres with mastery and rigour, and his influence on essay-writing and journalism across Spanish-speaking America.
The news reached Villoro in Barcelona, his father’s birthplace, just after his 70th birthday; he told Milenio he took it as an unexpected birthday present. He was born two years before La región más transparente made Mexico City the protagonist of Mexican fiction, and he describes an implicit dialogue with Fuentes running through his own writing about the capital, including El vértigo horizontal.
In an interview with El País, Villoro confessed a particular fondness for children’s literature, since most of the readers who connect with his work are 13 or younger. He recalled discovering his vocation at 15 through José Agustín’s De perfil, and handing his first novel (which Carlos Monsiváis had judged dreadful) to a passing rubbish lorry. He also warned that artificial intelligence flattens knowledge, which makes reading a form of first aid for independent thought.
Meanwhile, Villoro’s No fue penal (Almadía, 2023) has reached the stage at Foro Lucerna in Colonia Juárez, adapted by the author and directed by Antonio Castro. Martín Altomaro and José María de Tavira play a hot-headed coach and a former teammate turned VAR referee. Both men’s careers were ended by a training-ground collision, inspired by Mexican midfielder Alberto Onofre’s real-life fracture before the 1970 World Cup.
The Penacho enters Austrian politics
Günther Fehlinger-Jahn, an Austrian economist and political activist, has pledged that if he wins Austria’s federal presidency in 2028 he will return the Penacho de Moctezuma to Mexico. The headdress, made of quetzal and other feathers set with gold, has been in Austria since the late sixteenth century and anchors the Weltmuseum Wien’s Mesoamerican collection. Mexican presidents including AMLO have sought its return without success.
Fehlinger-Jahn made the promise on X, then posted that he would work with Mexican authorities, museums and specialists on a responsible return. Neither post sets a timetable or authorised procedure. In a 23 September interview with Publimetro México, he proposed permanent restitution and offered to deliver it personally.
Fehlinger-Jahn’s background is in consultancy on economic reform, small business policy and European integration, including as secretary general of SME Union, an association linked to the European People’s Party. He leads the Austrian Committee for NATO Enlargement, which campaigns for Austria to abandon its constitutional neutrality; according to Milenio, a NATO spokesperson said he has no official ties to the alliance.
The pledge belongs to a broader agenda casting Mexico as a bridge between North America and Europe. His EU50 project envisages a 50-member European Union including Mexico, though he acknowledges EU treaties restrict membership to European states and calls the plan a political vision requiring a new legal framework.
Practical obstacles remain: a binational study from 2010 to 2012 documented damage to the feathers and supporting netting, and Austria’s foreign ministry published findings that the headdress was unfit for air transport. Fehlinger-Jahn maintains a technical solution exists but has presented no supporting study. The Weltmuseum notes the link to Moctezuma II is unconfirmed: the earliest written record is a 1596 inventory of Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol’s collection at Ambras Castle, Innsbruck.
Fehlinger-Jahn’s candidacy is not officially confirmed, though his social media accounts affirm his plans to run in 2028.
Culture Chatter Box
MUAC puts its collection on permanent show. Almost 18 years after opening, the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) has given its collection a permanent home. Since 3 October, galleries 4, 5 and 6 have been dedicated to the holdings, which have grown from 980 works in 2008 to around 2,300. The first exhibition in the new cycle, Historias en construcción: Arte contemporáneo en México desde 1952. Colección MUAC, curated by Pilar García and Elva Peniche, brings together some 120 works and 60 documents by 72 artists. It traces the collecting lines set by founding curator Olivier Debroise. These run from Diego Rivera’s drawings for the Estadio Olímpico and Héctor García’s photographs of Ciudad Universitaria under construction to work by Graciela Iturbide and once-risky early acquisitions of artists such as Iñaki Bonillas and Melanie Smith. The show runs until 21 March 2027 at Insurgentes Sur 3000, in the Centro Cultural Universitario.
Tepito demands the return of its murals. Activists, artists and residents of Tepito have formed a common front to press the Cuauhtémoc borough to restore Los Niños, a mural erased from the Plan Tepito housing complex. They also want the return of other artworks on the complex’s walls, which were painted white under the previous borough administration. Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission found in September 2024 that the erasures violated residents’ right to culture, and the borough accepted its recommendation that October. Its nine points include a public apology and a new mural project designed in consultation with the community, due within a year. Two years on, the commission’s website lists only two points as fulfilled. The front includes art critic Alberto Híjar and Salomón, son of Daniel Manrique, who supervised the mural’s creation. It is gathering signatures to deliver to the president, the head of government and the borough.
Sheinbaum’s seamstress: “empowered” by the president, but low-profile. President Claudia Sheinbaum’s wardrobe is in the spotlight again, this time thanks to her seamstress. In a profile in El País, Olivia Trujillo, 64, explains how the story began with an anonymous commission in 2022. She only learned it was for Sheinbaum, then the mayor of Mexico City, when she spotted one of her suits on television. Since then, her work has appeared at the opening and close of Sheinbaum’s campaign, her 2023 wedding to Jesús María Tarriba and her swearing-in on 1 October 2024. Sheinbaum’s team sends photographs, colours or embroidery ideas, and Trujillo often reworks garments the president has already worn. The connection has a downside, however: Trujillo says it has cost her clients, though she insists she has no party affiliation and keeps a low profile. “My thing is making clothes,” she says.
Witches on the Water in Xochimilco. Sobrenatural: Ritos siniestros de las brujas de Xochimilco, the immersive Day of the Dead show that has become a seasonal fixture, returns for its 14th edition from 23 October to 7 November. Audiences board traditional trajinera boats at the Embarcadero Salitre for a night-time journey along the canals to a chinampa, where the play unfolds. The whole experience lasts around three hours, half of it on the water. Writer-director José Luis Huerta’s script follows Clementina, a woman accused of witchcraft, and draws on research in the Archivo General de la Nación, oral tradition and pre-Hispanic figures such as Cihuacóatl and Mictlantecuhtli. The final show, on 7 November at 8pm, marks the production’s 500th performance.
A taste of Gaza in Condesa. Mexico City’s omnivorous food scene keeps absorbing new cuisines, including that of a small group of Palestinians from Gaza. Mohammed Abed, a 36-year-old systems engineer who lost his four-year-old daughter in an Israeli air strike in 2025, came to Mexico with 17 family members seeking asylum. They followed his father, Kamal, who settled in the country more than a decade ago. On Tuesday mornings Abed loads a motorised tricycle with hummus, baba ganoush, falafel, shawarma and kebab for an open-air market in Condesa. His younger brother Fadi, 29, sells Palestinian food at a market in Escandón. Fadi has built an Instagram following of 48,000, posting in heavily accented Spanish. According to Reuters, the family are among roughly 160 Palestinians in Mexico, a population that has doubled since 2022.
Otis comes to the big screen. When Hurricane Otis struck Acapulco in October 2023, sailors Marlon Valdez and Jonathan Chino were aboard the boats they had been sent to watch over, and lived to tell the tale. Their story, first reported by El País days after the disaster, inspired Jorge Michel Grau’s Contra el huracán (Surviving Hurricane Otis). The film opens in Mexican cinemas on 15 October and reaches Netflix on 23 October, almost on the storm’s anniversary. Some 800 people worked on it over three years, 500 of them on visual effects, and a water tank and three eight-tonne boats were built at the Churubusco studios. The real sailors advised on the production and make a cameo; neither has returned to sea. Michel Grau also tackles the practice of sending workers to guard mostly insured boats as storms approach. Twenty-four sailors remain missing to this day.
Culture Outing
Festival Internacional del Libro del Zócalo 2026
The 26th Feria Internacional del Libro del Zócalo opened on 9 October and runs through 18 October in Mexico City’s Zócalo. Entry is free and stands open daily from 11am to 9pm. This year’s edition gathers 353 publishers and 266 activities and, according to the city’s culture secretary, focuses on the themes of fundamentalism and neo-fascism. Highlights include a talk by Gustavo Petro, Julieta Venegas presenting her memoir and Giovanni Porzio’s war photography exhibition. Last year’s fair drew more than 1.3 million visitors.
Culture Conversation
La creatividad como estilo de vida y business plan: Toño Vilches en Productistas
In the second episode of Productistas, a freshly launched podcast about Mexico’s creative industries, hosts Avelino Rodríguez and Ilana Sod talk with Toño Vilches, co-founder of Archipiélago, the ecosystem behind projects like Mezcal Unión, Cancino, Trópico and the ACME art fair. Toño explains how the group built a lifestyle before a business plan, and why putting the consumer at the center draws in the rest of the industry. He also looks at what comes next after 17 years: deciding which projects to let go, and closing the gap between those who create Mexican brands and those who can scale them.