"The Fall Guy"

Why don't audiences like audience-friendly movies anymore?

A puzzling question is why the expertly executed The Fall Guy, a big-budget action / romantic comedy movie with Ryan Gosling following up his triumph as Ken in Barbie playing a movie stunt double and Emily Blunt as his directrix / love interest, was a semi-dud at the box office last May. It made $93 million in North America after a weak $28 million opening weekend on the traditional first weekend of the summer blockbuster season, and $88 million overseas for a total of $181 million worldwide, on a production budget said to be $130 to $150 million (the movie, not surprisingly, features a vast number of spectacular stunts), plus a lot of marketing because it had looked like a hit. It got an A- rating from folks who saw it opening weekend and had okay legs, but simply didn’t get off to much of a start.

That’s not terrible, but it’s not very good for the kind of movie everybody complains that they don’t make anymore.

It’s a fun film. The Fall Guy was designed to be an all-quadrants PG-13 movie for just about every mass market segment: grown-up date night / teens / and families with adolescents, pretty much everybody other than small children and the art house set. To my mind, it largely succeeded at those ambitions.

So, why didn’t The Fall Guy make a half billion dollars?

- The most obvious reason is that going-to-the-movies is a 120 year old custom based on 120 year old technology, so of course it’s finally fading. Nowadays, everybody has perfectly nice TV sets in their living rooms (with total fingertip control over your preferences such as captions, when to start the movie, rewinding parts you missed when you went to the bathroom, etc.). So why bother going to the show, other than nostalgic habit?

I can recall thinking in mid-March 2020 when hearing while driving down Santa Monica Boulevard that the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, had announced that he was ordering the movie theaters shut due to the coronavirus, that this would be the death blow to Los Angeles’ most famous industry. The whole world, I reasoned, would assumed that if the mayor of Los Angeles was shutting movie theaters, then they should too. (The government of Sweden was the rare exception, but then the Swedish theaters decided to shut themselves because nobody was going to the movies). And that this would break the already obsolescent habit of movie-going.

It appears that domestic box office in 2023-2024 has settled in at about 25% lower in nominal terms than the good old days of 2018-2019, and considerably lower than that in inflation-adjusted terms.

I went to a Reddit page devoted to Box Office. Some of the views on this question of the failure of The Fall Guy were:

- Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt aren’t real movie stars, they just get cast in a lot of good movies. (I actually could believe this that some actors appeal more to talented filmmakers than to audiences. Gosling’s career reminds me a little of Robert De Niro’s and Meryl Streep’s in that they were mostly cast in serious dramas when young, but when De Niro and Streep hit middle-age around 1989, they finally started making comedies and were brilliant in them.)

- Nobody anymore likes movies that aren’t based on major intellectual property. (The Fall Guy was a moderately popular ABC TV show from 1981-1986 starring Lee Major, but nobody seems to remember it the way they remember all these other lame-o IPs.) Actually, it seems pretty post-hoc what’s considered majori intellectual property.

- The movie is about how important are anonymous stunt men to the making of their favorite movies. (That’s a favorite Hollywood topic. Hollywood insiders like Quentin Tarantino love all the tough guys who make their movies possible. But, according to Reddit, everybody out in the hinterlands hates the idea that their favorite movie stars don’t do all their own stunts. Hence, everybody loathes stunt men. That seems pretty weird to me, but it could well be right. For example, the 1980 movie The Stunt Man, with Peter O’Toole as a diabolical director modeled on David Lean struck me at the time as sensational, but nobody else cared. Growing up, the guy across the street from me was a Japanese-American wrestling coach / martial arts instructor / stunt man.

Bill Saito was just about the nicest guy I ever knew, so of course I’m prejudiced in favor of stunt men.

But according to Reddit contributors, lots of people love movie stars but hate Hollywood and they hate movies about making movies.)

In contrast, while I don’t take seriously anybody’s Academy Award speeches, I’m impressed by the amount of organized effort put into making movies like The Fall Guy. The idea that there are a whole bunch of regular guys like Bill who contribute their particular talents to making the films you enjoy seems like A Good Thing. And that their are people who can coordinate all these talents seems even better.

- Everybody hates America and they don’t like to be reminded that their favorite movies are made by Americans.

- My theory is that the problem with The Fall Guy is that it tries to appeal across various identity categories, such as male and female and young and old, which people don’t like these days. Back in the days of Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, Americans loved date movies that appealed to both men and women via Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. After all, why not save money by going to a movie that is intended to please both you and yours?

But today, people want movies that appeal to their individual tastes. So it irritates contemporary audiences when movies seem designed to appeal to their near and dear ones as well as to themselves.