"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: