In Hollywood, the first weekend of May is traditionally seen as the official kick-off of the summer movie season: an auspicious blockbuster date that has, of late, become rather a boring one.
Since 2007, when Spider-Man 3 (three full cycles ago in that deathless franchise) topped the box office – and barring two years where the global pandemic threw the mainstream release schedule into disarray – that weekend has been the exclusive domain of Marvel superhero adaptations, through to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 claiming the No 1 spot last May. That stranglehold was set to continue this year, with the legacy-milking superhero mash-up comedy Deadpool & Wolverine scheduled for a 3 May release. It doubtless would have creamed the competition, too, had last year’s Hollywood strikes not delayed it to July.
And so, with the coveted early-May date open to a cape-free blockbuster for the first time since the Bush administration, Universal spotted an opportunity for its action romcom The Fall Guy, about a Hollywood stunt man tangled in an insider conspiracy.
They had reason to be confident. Ryan Gosling was riding a wave of public goodwill after his film-stealing turn in last year’s top grosser Barbie; pairing him with Emily Blunt, fresh from her appearance in Barbie’s summer sibling Oppenheimer, was a neat marketing angle the stars gamely launched as a presenting duo at the Oscars in March. Two days later, the film premiered to jubilant audience reactions at the hip SXSW festival. It seemed director David Leitch, who drove the comparably goofy action flick Bullet Train to a $240m gross in 2022, had another hit on his hands.
Or not, as it turned out. The Fall Guy opened modestly in the US, taking a little over $27m in its first weekend. At the time of writing, it’s made nearly $108m worldwide – not a bomb, but not a palpable hit either. Reviews have been solid; audience scores are good. All indications are that it’s a crowdpleaser, at least for the medium-sized crowds that are showing up. But why aren’t they bigger?
It comes down to the dreaded letters IP, or intellectual property: the pre-established brands, story worlds and characters on which the vast majority of big-budget studio movies are sold these days, to the detriment of original screenplays and untested ideas.
Technically, The Fall Guy is an adaptation, loosely drawn from an ABC television series that aired from 1981 to 1986. However, the IP in this case has lingered so little in the public imagination that Leitch’s film may as well be an original property. Universal instead marketed the film on star power and the promise of a good, fun time – a deal ticket-buyers were willing to take in the 90s but are warier of now. Everybody loves Gosling, but they love him most when he’s playing a character as recognisable and meme-ready as Barbie’s Ken; he may work the same vein of self-deprecating himbo comedy in The Fall Guy, but action-man Colt Seavers doesn’t have the same allure.
Universal had reason to think they might turn back the clock. The story of last year’s summer box office was the aforementioned Barbie–Oppenheimer double – disparate films that turned the rather banal fact of a shared release date into a wildly successful marketing gimmick, as audiences fashioned “Barbenheimer” into a double-feature roadshow with little official prompting from the studios. The films were not exactly original: Barbie was a corporation-backed spin-off vehicle for Mattel’s most iconic toy line; Oppenheimer a biopic of a much-discussed historical figure. But they were, in the current blockbuster landscape, bracingly unconventional.
Greta Gerwig’s loopy metatextual approach to Barbie looked and felt like nothing else at the multiplex; ditto Christopher Nolan’s rather sober three-hour chamber film, which, notwithstanding one spectacular explosion scene, riskily banked on the more arthouse-inclined pitch of men debating strategy and morality in dim rooms.
That the two films made a combined $2.4bn worldwide seemed, at least to the industry’s more optimistic seers, a sign that audiences were wearying of longstanding studio formulae and hankering for something fresh. It was an impression assisted by a recent downturn in superhero movie fortunes and a historically bad year for industry colossus Disney, the most tireless IP recyclers of all. When The Marvels, a confusingly titled sequel to the 2019 smash Captain Marvel, limped last November to $206m, the lowest gross yet in the ranks of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it made Barbenheimer’s success look all the more groundbreaking by comparison.
But these are selective narratives of triumph and downfall: the bigger picture of Hollywood product is still a cautious, homogeneous one. Sandwiched between Barbie and Oppenheimer on last year’s list of box office champions was Universal’s thoroughly generic, IP-dependent videogame adaptation The Super Mario Bros. Movie. The top 10 also included superhero outings Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, plus Disney’s self-plundering The Little Mermaid remake and umpteenth instalments in the Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious action franchises. Only the Pixar’s animation Elemental, in 10th place, could be called a wholly original creation, give or take that studio’s familiar and well-tested narrative template.
With last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes having hampered production on a number of much-anticipated titles, 2024 was always expected to be a difficult year. The year’s biggest box office hit so far is a postponed sequel that was supposed to be last year’s autumn saviour: Dune: Part Two has at least lifted industry spirits by grossing $710m worldwide, approaching double what its predecessor made in 2021 and flying a flag for reasonably grown-up genre cinema with artistic aspirations.
The same cannot be said for the year’s runner-up, the garishly synthetic monster movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, nor the tired sequels Kung Fu Panda 4 and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, clocking in third and fourth. In fifth, the mediocre musical biopic Bob Marley: One Love is the year’s most surprising success, proving a measure of commercial appetite for stories about actual human beings.
But drop-off in grosses is steep even in the top tier: it’s indicative of what a lean year it has been at the box office so far that the universally derided superhero flop Madame Web sits just outside the global top 10. Buzzy, originally scripted adult dramas such as Alex Garland’s Civil War and Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers have dominated online discourse and made respectable mid-range money ($109m and $70m respectively), but neither has quite risen to the level of an outlying commercial phenomenon. Getting mass audiences to invest in characters they haven’t met remains the toughest game in Hollywood: filmmakers wishing to tell less formulaic stories increasingly have to work outside the system.
Take 85-year-old director Francis Ford Coppola, who unveiled his deliriously eccentric passion project Megalopolis at Cannes this week, having invested $120m of his own funds into this dystopian sci-fi allegory for modern America as a new Roman empire. Reactions are divided, but everyone agrees that it’s nothing if not a singular vision. Explaining the independence of its pricey production last week, Coppola spoke for many by saying: “I fear that the film industry has become more a matter of people being hired to meet their debt obligations, because the studios are in great, great debt. And the job is not so much to make good movies.”
The summer ahead has few sure things on the horizon: as the only major superhero release of the season, much will ride on Deadpool & Wolverine to prove the genre’s continued commercial muscle, while the fate of sequels such as Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, A Quiet Place: Day One and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – launched at Cannes last week with a defiantly glitzy premiere – will tell anxious studios if they really do need to change course.
Meanwhile, the year’s most belated franchise extension – Twisters, a sequel to the 1996 tornado adventure – may or may not be a nostalgia-fuelled hit, but it’ll certainly make studio execs think back fondly on easier days, when a new idea wasn’t the fall guy.
