Summary
- Despite critical praise,
The Fall Guy
struggled to attract a young audience in theaters. - The star power of Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling couldn’t prevent the film from becoming a box-office flop.
- Outpaced by
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
,
The Fall Guy
may rely on streaming success.
With its deft blend of action, comedy, and romance, along with the winning screen chemistry of stars Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling, the action-comedy film The Fall Guy seemed like the perfect film to launch the 2024 summer box-office season, which is the first summer season since 2009 not to be launched by the release of a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film.
Loosely based on the 1980s television series of the same name, The Fall Guy stars Gosling as Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stunt performer who left this career after a previous stunt went awry but returns to help his former girlfriend, Blunt’s Jody Moreno, who is making her feature directorial debut in Sydney, Australia. After Jody’s leading man suddenly vanishes, Colt is tasked with finding the star and saving the film.
However, despite its assortment of seemingly appealing elements, The Fall Guy has become one of the biggest box-office disappointments of 2024. One reason given for the film’s disappointing box-office performance is that the movie, which is an ode to Hollywood stuntpeople and was directed by former Hollywood stuntperson David Leitch, is too much of an inside-Hollywood film to appeal to a broad and young audience. Others have suggested that many audiences have simply decided to wait to watch The Fall Guy through streaming.
The Fall Guy Fell Short of Box-Office Expectations
The Fall Guy
4/5
The Fall Guy is an action thriller from Bullet Train and Deadpool 2 director David Leitch. Ryan Gosling stars as a stuntman who is forced to find a missing movie star, investigate a conspiracy, and repair his relationship with the love of his life. The film was written by Drew Pearce and inspired by the 1980s TV series of the same name.
- Release Date
- May 3, 2024
- Runtime
- 1hr 54min
In its opening weekend of release, The Fall Guy, which was projected to gross between $30 million and $40 million in its opening weekend of domestic release, grossed $27.7 million. This was especially disappointing given the fact that the film’s release was accompanied by generally positive critical reviews and a strong marketing push.
Ryan Gosling Hates Heights but Fell 150 Feet for The Fall Guy
Ryan Gosling’s stunt double, Ben Jenkin, praises the actor for doing that 150-foot drop: “He was so game to do lots of things.”
While the $27.7 million total was good enough for The Fall Guy to be able to claim the top stop on the domestic box office chart, this was a symbolic victory, in which The Fall Guy finished ahead of the re-release of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, while the only other debuting release, the low-budget supernatural horror film Tarot, finished fourth. The $27.7 million total is further diminished by the fact that The Fall Guy was released in over 4,000 theaters.
The Star Power of Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling Had a Limited Box-Office Impact
Given that The Fall Guy is based on a 1980s television series that a younger crowd may be unfamiliar with, the main selling point for the film is the pairing of Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling, for whom The Fall Guy was preceded by their respective Oscar-nominated triumphs in the blockbuster 2023 films Oppenheimer and Barbie.
However, the outlying box-office performance of Barbie and Oppenheimer provided a misleading sample of the box-office drawing power that Blunt and Gosling, who are now 41 and 43, respectively, brought to The Fall Guy, especially with younger audiences, for whom the brand is otherwise irrelevant. This is reflected in the film’s audience tracking data, in which people under the age of 25 comprise less than 30% of the film’s theatrical audience.
Excluding Barbie and Oppenheimer, the $27.7 million domestic opening for The Fall Guy is fairly commensurate with the openings for Blunt and Gosling’s previous star-vehicle films. For Blunt, the $27.7 million opening is just short of the $28.7 million opening for Edge of Tomorrow, while the $27.7 million figure represents one of Gosling’s best non-Barbie openings, behind only the $32.7 million opening for Blade Runner 2049.
The Fall Guy Was Crushed by Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
In its second weekend of release, The Fall Guy finished a distant second at the domestic box office with a total of approximately $13.7 million, a drop of 51%, for a current domestic total of approximately $49.6 million. The Fall Guy, which has grossed $54 million at the overseas box office, has a current worldwide total of over $103 million.
The Fall Guy was easily supplanted in the top spot on the domestic box office chart by the epic science-fiction film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth installment in the Planet of the Apes reboot franchise, which collected an impressive $56.5 million domestically and $72.5 million overseas for an opening-weekend worldwide total of approximately $129 million.
If The Fall Guy, which carries a production cost of between $125 million and $150 million compared to $160 million for Kingdom of the Planet Apes, had been made for a lower cost, like the sub-$90 million 2022 action-comedy films Bullet Train and The Lost City, the film’s relative box-office failure obviously wouldn’t be nearly as glaring and publicized as it’s become. This also would have made a potential The Fall Guy sequel seem much more plausible than it does now.
Emily Blunt Confesses Kissing Some of Hollywood’s Leading Men has Made Her Feel Sick
Emily Blunt shared a candid reaction when asked if she had ever wanted to throw-up after kissing one of her leading men by Howard Stern.
With an estimated marketing cost of between $80 million and $100 million, The Fall Guy, which is on pace to finish well short of the $100 million mark in its domestic run, needs to gross approximately $310 to $350 million at the worldwide box office just to reach its theatrical break-even point. The Fall Guy is destined to become a box-office disaster for distributor Universal Pictures, which can only hope that the film either performs spectacularly at the overseas box office, where the movie is presently languishing behind Kingdom of the Planet of Apes or becomes a sensation on Universal’s Peacock streaming service to pare the film’s massive theatrical loss. The Fall Guy is in theaters now.
