It's Not the Movie; It's the Market
Why 'The Fall Guy' had a rough opening weekend.
This past weekend, I got into a debate with a friend and fellow critic about why The Fall Guy only made $28 million on its opening weekend, the lowest box office gross for the first weekend in May since 1995 (discounting the pandemic, obviously). He argued that if the film had stronger writing, it would have been more popular, and thus generated stronger word-of-mouth. I countered that plenty of poorly-written movies do well on their opening weekend, and plenty of well-written movies have flopped. For me, while you can look at micro issues with The Fall Guy (perhaps it’s not the greatest script ever, but it’s certainly good enough by blockbuster standards), I feel like the macro issues tell a fuller story of what’s happening, and what’s going to happen this summer at the movies.
The first is that IP still reigns supreme, and while The Fall Guy is based on a 1980s Lee Majors series, that’s not exactly what you would call a die-hard fanbase. The past decades taught audiences that if they want to make a safe choice for a movie, there needs to be a name attached, and that name needs to be something they recognize whether it’s a book, a long-running franchise, a toy, or what have you. Stars used to matter, but they’ve become secondary to the brand. If you’re making a movie that isn’t a recognizable IP, you better load up on as many movie stars as possible and hope for the best. Ryan Gosling is riding high as a movie star right now, but he’s just one man, and the audience now goes for IP rather than individual stars. The days when you can simply attach a Schwarzenegger or a Willis and call it a day are gone.
Second, the financials don’t make sense to the average moviegoer. If you have an event film like Barbie or Oppenheimer or just want to get the kids out of the house with some reliable family fare like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, then you’ll pay for that high ticket price. But the cost of one movie ticket now is roughly equal to a month’s worth of a streaming service. Is it really necessary to spend $15 to see The Fall Guy on opening weekend, or could you keep that $15 in your back pocket, wait for six weeks or so, and then buy a month of Peacock to see the film on the streamer? Comcast (the parent company of Universal, the studio behind The Fall Guy) may not see this as working against their interests (cannibalizing box office receipts in favor of possibly wooing a streaming subscriber), but simply talking about the beauty of the big screen for spectacle and the communal experience of going to the theater are intangibles that don’t suffice for high ticket prices, the hassle of driving to the multiplex, and the subpar experience of sitting next to patrons who left their living room so they could treat the movie theater like their living room. Where’s the urgency to see this movie under subpar theatrical conditions?
Third, while you can argue that this movie shouldn’t have cost $130 million if its main narrative is a romantic comedy, which should cost far less, you run into two problems. Specifically, The Fall Guy may have a love story at its forefront, but the larger film is about how much we love stunts and stuntpeople, and stunts typically require set pieces. Set pieces are expensive, so unless you made a straightforward Ryan Gosling/Emily Blunt rom-com without all the action scenes, I don’t see how this is a cheaper movie. That leads to the larger problem, which is that assuming you did make a straightforward romantic comedy that only cost $50 million, a studio now won’t release that into theaters; they’ll likely send it straight to streaming. This is the donut hole problem that’s been happening for over a decade now where either your movie costs less than $20 million (your indie movies, your Blumhouse horror flicks) or it has to cost more than $80 million under the belief that if there’s not big screen spectacle, audiences won’t bother turning out.
The final factor is that we’re witnessing the fallout of the studios failing to resolve last year’s strikes in a timely fashion. The studios thought they could beat both the writers and the actors, and got their clocks cleaned by union solidarity on both counts. Now they’re dreadfully behind in getting out new movies while the streamers like Netflix can sit back and churn out movies that may not be good, but they’re available, which is sometimes all people want from their entertainment. Moviegoing has to be a habit, something that fulfills a part of your identity no different than going to see a concert or sports event (although moviegoing remains much cheaper than tickets for live programming). But to get back to that level of normalcy, studios are willing to scrap summer 2024 to go big in summer 2025. I don’t know if that bet will pay off, but it likely means we’re in for the lowest-grossing summer blockbuster season in recent memory. The only movies I can see as surefire hits are family-friendly sequels like Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 as well as the new Deadpool movie (which is also going to rest partly on bringing Hugh Jackman back as Wolverine for the first time in seven years).
There are times when individual films are at fault for their poor reception. There are times when even the film’s existence is a baffling choice (hence the How Did This Get Made? podcast). But when we pinpoint individual films, it can be a limited diagnosis that causes us to put too much blame on a single data point while missing the larger trends at work. I look at The Fall Guy, and I don’t think it’s a script polish away from making the $100 million+ opening weekend that Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 made a year ago or that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness made the year before that. It’s certainly nice to believe that audiences will reward strong writing and punish weak scripts, but I don’t think people stayed home because they heard that The Fall Guy needs a tighter third act. I think they stayed home because nothing in the marketing or the marketplace told them they needed to leave the house for a Ryan Gosling action rom-com based on a 1980s Lee Majors TV series.
Recommendations
I know I’ve recommended Dave Karpf in the past, but I love this article where he takes a look at Elon Musk’s favorite video game, Polytopia, says about Elon Musk. In the Walter Isaacson biography, Isaacson treats the game as a sign of Musk’s genius without ever doing the legwork of playing the game himself (Michael Lewis makes a similar mistake about Sam Bankman-Fried’s obsession with the game Storybook Brawl in Going Infinite). Karpf’s insights about the game and theory as to why Musk enjoys it so much makes for a more compelling insight than “This man is playing multi-dimensional chess; we can’t possibly hope to keep up.”
Over in 4K, there’s a new steelbook of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock coming out for the film’s 40th anniversary. I already have a 4K box set of the original Star Trek movies, so there’s no need for me to pick this up separately. But I will take this opportunity to say that Search for Spock demolishes the argument that every odd-numbered Star Trek movie is bad. Search for Spock is a wonderful movie, and its greatest “crime” is coming after Wrath of Khan, one of the best sci-fi films ever made. So no, Search for Spock is not “as good” as Wrath of Khan, but not many sci-fi movies are. On its own merits, Search for Spock takes the grief and regrets from Wrath of Khan and then pushes them forward into an exciting new adventure where the Enterprise crew risks everything to reunite with their friend. It’s lovely!
Note: I receive a small percentage of sales made through my Amazon Associates links.
What I’m Watching
I saw Evil Does Not Exist, the new movie from Oscar-winning Drive My Car director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Like Drive My Car, Hamaguchi shows himself to be an incredibly patient, thoughtful filmmaker who wraps his audience in character and setting rather than worry that viewers may not have the attention span if something big doesn’t happen in the first five minutes (this one opens with some long shots looking up at branches before we see the main character chopping wood; not exactly an “in medias res” shootout). The story concerns a small village whose tranquility is threatened by the potential arrival of a glamping outfit that has no regard for the fragile ecosystem they would disrupt, but rather than simply providing a conservation fable, Hamaguchi casts his gaze to questions of what constitutes “nature” in both animals and people. The ending sent me for a loop, but it’s also what makes the film a richer, more philosophical piece than the simple, direct critique of capitalism that comes before.
Evil Does Not Exist is now playing in limited release and opens in Atlanta on Friday.
I also saw and reviewed Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which you can read over at TheWrap. Briefly: I didn’t care for it!
Elsewhere, this past May the 4th (aka Star Wars Day), I rewatched the Star Wars sequel trilogy with my wife, who had never seen the concluding chapter, Rise of Skywalker. My opinion on the movies remains pretty fixed in that I think Force Awakens is an enjoyable-if-safe reboot, The Last Jedi is a bold, exhilarating challenge to the Star Wars mythos, and Rise of Skywalker is a rushed, deeply embarrassing final chapter that serves to make the whole Star Wars universe smaller and more insular. I also think it’s surprising (and perhaps a bit telling) that in the five years since Rise of Skywalker, there hasn’t been a new Star Wars movie or a new movie from its director, J.J. Abrams.
What I’m Reading
I finished reading Endurance this past weekend, and it scratched the itch for a non-fiction survival story, but it wasn’t completely what I was looking for. Part of why I like books like In the Heart of the Sea and The Lost City of Z is that while you certainly get a sense of a battle against the elements, there’s also a sense of the psychology and personalities at play. Endurance author Alfred Lansing doesn’t give us that. He’s far more focused on the “how” of their survival, which is certainly compelling but can also be a bit dry.
Also, they had to kill and eat their dog sled puppies. I get it was for survival and not for funsies, but still—more puppy-eating than I expected going in.
I’ve now moved on to reading Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists. I’ve never seen Heaven’s Gate, but since it’s leaving Criterion Channel at the end of the month, I figured now was finally the time to read this book and see the movie as well.
In other reads:
How Rebel ‘Star Wars’ Fans Saved the Original Movies by Sopan Deb [The New York Times] - I continue to find George Lucas’ relationship with the original Star Wars trilogy fascinating. Typically, when directors change an original cut, it’s because they and the audience agreed that there was a better version that needed to be realized. In the case of Star Wars, Lucas and fans disagree. He thinks the original movies are flawed, and audiences think those movies are largely perfect. Audiences also don’t agree that the changes Lucas made, like having Greedo shoot first or the clumsy scene where Han bargains with a poorly composited CGI Jabba the Hutt, improve the movies. I begrudgingly used to side with Lucas as they were his movies, and as owner of Lucasfilm, he was entitled to make those changes. But ever since he sold Lucasfilm to Disney, I’m now on the side of the fans, and if Lucas doesn’t want the untouched originals out in the world, then he shouldn’t have sold his company for $4 billion. Lucas may not like fans working to preserve the original cuts of the original trilogy, but I don’t like the “Jedi Rocks” scene in Return of the Jedi, and I don’t have $4 billion to cry on.
What I’m Hearing
Now that I’m fully caught up on The Bear, I’ve been listening to this playlist of various songs used across the show’s two seasons thus far. The show is incredibly good at needledrops, and if I ever need to feel stressed out, I can just pop on “New Noise.”
What I’m Playing
As my good friend Brad will attest, I am a weirdo for artificial video game achievements. I thought I would put down Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and move on, but no. Now I’m in it, and my completionist side is gnawing at me, telling me to do all the tough tasks to get to 100%. I should probably just seek therapy, but in all fairness, this is cheaper and therapists typically don’t give you trophies.
Great piece Matt about why The Fall Guy didn’t work. Nowadays for a blockbuster movie to be successful at the theater it needs to feel like an event or a huge family entertainment time.