The Wall Street Journal’s Robbie Whelan asked a question on Saturday morning…
… which caused me to spend some Saturday time doing a little research. The question was in consideration of The Fall Guy’s failure to open to open the summer, in spite of 2 “A-list” stars, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
Here are some establishing stats…
The first ever $100 million opening weekend was on “opening day” of summer with Spider-Man pulling in $115 million on May 3, 2002.
In the 20 “opening days” since (not counting 2020 or 2021 and including the week-early launches of the last Avengers films), 11 have been $100 million or better and just 3 have been under $50 million.
The Fall Guy is the 2nd lowest “summer opening weekend” grosser in these last 22 years, after 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven, and the 97th best opening in the month of May. The third under-$50m summer launch was Mission: Impossible III with $47.7 million.
The Fall Guy is only movie to put itself in that summer opening slot in these last 21 summer launches that can arguably have been marketed with movie stars as the primary draw.
17 of the 21 summer launches were Marvel movies… including all 11 of the $100 million openers.
This is where I point out that Spider-Man really launched the CG era of summer movies, albeit following on the evolutionary tail of 1993’s Jurassic Park and 1996’s Twister, and 1998’s Godzilla. The world believed a man could swing through the canyons on Manhattan for real… look at it now at it looks a bit weak… but it was truly the cutting edge in 2002 and it allowed comic book movies to be a lot more like the visceral comic book experience.
In all these years since 2002, there have only been 8 $100 million openings in May that were not released on “opening day.” 37 more have opened to between $50 million and $99 million aside from “opening day.”
So overall… in the history of the month of May, there have been just 20 $100 million openers, the only non-Marvel of these launches being Top Gun II, Pirates III, Star Wars 6, Shrek II & III, and Indiana Jones 4.
There have been a total of 43 May $50m - $99m openings in history. Only 9 of those were neither Marvel movies nor direct movie sequels or reboots. They are The DaVinci Code, Finding Nemo, Maleficent, The Day After Tomorrow, Up, Bruce Almighty, Sex and the City, Chronicles of Narnia, and San Andreas.
This should make clear how unusual a big opening for non-Marvel, non-sequel, non-reboot is in May. The Da Vinci Code starred Tom Hanks and was a massive worldwide phenom as a book. Maleficent starred Angelina Jolie and was a twist on Sleeping Beauty. The Day After Tomorrow was a Roland Emmerich destroys the world film, freezing over New York City for his biggest career opening and his 3rd biggest grosser. Bruce Almighty had America’s favorite wacky movie comedian given God-like powers. And San Andreas (a destroy the world film not by Emmerich) had Dwayne Johnson coming off of his career-best opening with Furious 7 just a month earlier.
This May had 4 openings with the ambition of being major… aka over $50 million. Only Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes succeeded, delivering pretty much the same exact opening number as 3 of the 4 previous films in the modern franchise.
But as you can see, opening to $50 million in May is not a fastball down the middle of the plate, unless you are a Marvel movie or a sequel to/reboot of a big hit or, as is the case with the 9 titles that did it without that status, unusual opportunities of some other origin. This was true before the pandemic and before streaming. This is likely to be true moving forward.
So The Fall Guy, IF, and Furiosa… all opened between $26 million and $34 million.
Furiosa is the sequel, so let’s start there. The 102th “best” opening in May.
Interestingly, the movies next to it on the list of May openings are Beverly Hills Cop II, Alice Through The Looking Glass, and After Earth. In 1987, Cop II’s opening was the best of the entire summer… different opening universe. Alice II (2016) was a 6 years later sequel with all the major star attached who had opened the first film to $116 million. This is one of the worst failed sequel openings ever, less than 1/4 of the prior film. After Earth was Will Smith’s return to the movies after a 5-year hiatus with the exception of the 3rd (disappointing) Men in Black film. Like his last appearance, other than MIB, Seven Pounds, it was not what would be seen as a “Will Smith” movie and his son was more the center of the story than he… which was conveyed in the marketing that Smith insisted on.
Furiosa was a prequel with a wholly different cast than the 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road, which was a return to this material 30 years after the previous entry, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. As much as we in the media loved Fury Road, it opened to $45 million, the 4th best opening that May. So 8 years after that, the franchise returns without Charlize Theron as Furiosa and without Tom Hardy - who became Venom since Fury Road - and with a clear female focus. I am pretty sure that Warners was hoping that the magic of Barbie would be rubbing off on Furiosa. But that was not the case. As for stars, Anya Taylor-Joy’s previous best opening in a lead role was The Menu, opening to $9 million. The seeming movie star power was Chris Hemsworth, but this too was his biggest opening outside of franchises of Marvel, Snow White, Ghostbusters, and Men in Black. Moreover, Hemsworth was in a big ol’ nose prosthetic and sporting an accent that did not play on his previous successes… a performance and a concept which I loved. His character is a philosophical motormouth. But the verbosity - opposite Furiosa’s near silence - was buried a bit by WB marketing, pushing the female lead more heavily in the summer after Barbie.
I am not in WB’s marketing department, which has had a lot of success in the last year. But they did not find the winning pitch, clearly. On the other hand, the underperformance was not really as dramatic as the media played it off as.
Moving on to IF… I have been whining about the trouble that was coming on this one for months before opening. A family movie about death. A new kid in the lead. Ryan Reynolds in a role so undefined that even the marketing kind of made fun of it (“Who Left This Guy In Charge?”). The overall marketing was all over the place, as much as any movie I have seen in years. And it still opened to $33 million. Why? Because it opened in a market with absolutely nothing for families, months into Kung Fu Panda 5. It was not what people were hoping for, but it was as much as anyone should have expected… more. Once I saw the film, I could see that the movie was even more challenging for the Paramount marketing department than I knew, because the movie is all over the place as well (even if some of it is very charming and heart warming).
So The Fall Guy… the hard, simple reality is that this was a movie where 1 plus 1 equaled 2, while everyone involved was hoping that it would add up to 10.
This piece was “twitter assigned” to me by the Wall Street Journal’s Robbie Whelan with these 2 tweets (following up from the one at the top of this piece):
Let’s start with the problems with the premise. Robbie’s been at the Journal since 2010, so I assume he is over 35, not 18-35. He has a challenging job and a spouse, so that puts him right in the most difficult-to-deliver movie demographic, 35-60, not in the sweet spot. He also doesn’t mention kids, so assuming they don’t have 1 or more, they aren’t soaking in the under-18 market at all. Obviously, he covers this beat, so he is more interested than the average American his age. But people over 30 are not the core of the movie-going audience. We just aren’t.
Who was The Fall Guy for? Everyone loves Ryan and Emily… but they are both over 40 now. Ryan has been a phenom since he landed on movie screens in The Believer in 2001, but has had a checkered commercial career… I think, by choice. He is magic, but he spent the better part of 2 decades trying not to win the movie star wars. Barbie was not only the top box office event of his career in every way, it was his only film ever to open over $30 million domestically and the only one to ever gross more than $320 million. Internationally, La La Land and Blade Runner 2040 were the only Gosling titles that significantly overperformed domestic.
Emily has been a star since 2006‘s The Devil Wears Prada. She has had 6 films open over $30 million. But they all come with strings. The Wolfman (2010) is a movie about a guy who turns into a wolf, not the female lead. Into The Woods (2014) was an ensemble and though her role might be considered a lead in the show, it was not in the marketing of this film. Emily was fantastic in A Quiet Place (2019) and the sequel (2020), but it is absolutely a premise-driven franchise. Jungle Cruise was her and The Rock in an action-heavy spin on The African Queen. It was The Rock’s 18th best opening of a movie in which he was a lead. And of course, Oppenheimer, where she got a much-deserved Best Supporting Actress nod. As great as she and Cillian were, they were not bigger than the atomic bomb. Also… Oppenheimer and the Tom Cruise domestic underperformer, Edge of Tomorrow, are the only Blunt films to do significantly better overseas than at home.
So you have 2 leads in a movie that is sold heavily on them and how much the world likes them and the heat off of last summer. But neither one has ever opened a movie to over $30 million as The Opening Movie Stars.
The IP for this film went off the air 38 years ago and while old guys like me are a bit nostalgic for it, it is not something like The Golden Girls, which has been on the top of every “great old show” lists and is now considered a beloved classic. Nor does it have a premise that means anything… or meant much back then. I recently revisited Hooper - amazingly on TCM on night - and it seemed a lot more of the inspiration for The Fall Guy than the old TV show.
I don’t see a fastball coming across the plate… certainly not one that had any place in the Summer Opener slot.
Why does the dating matter to me more than Mr. Whelan? Because it matters to the industry as a whole and to the launch of summer in specific. And because the bar has been set at $50 million minimum for the last 22 years. The 3 films that didn’t open to $50 million were/are all considered box office trouble. Fox’s Kingdom of Heaven had stars and Ridley Scott… The Passion of the Christ had been a phenom the year before and LOTR: Return of the King the year before that… and “no one” cared to see it. Paramount’s Mission: Impossible III launched so below expectations that Sumner Redstone basically threw Tom Cruise off the lot because Cruise had dollar-one gross and a big DVD chunk combining for at least a $60 million payday and Paramount would end that year with the film squarely in red ink.
The Fall Guy had everything you could ask for in a movie that was expected to open to $25 million and, hopefully, be leggy and get to $125 million domestic. Maybe it becomes a phenom and gets to $175m. But Universal didn’t choose to put it in the “launch at 25 and leg it out” slot. They didn’t date it mid-summer and let it play as a change of pace experience with actors you love.
Cocaine Bear opened to $23 million and got to $65 million domestic last year. It was unexpected. It was cheap. It was in February. So it was considered a big hit. Had it opened this summer, it might have opened to $30 million and got to $80 million… maybe. But it opened where it belonged and with that, is seen as a winner.
Five Nights at Freddy's opened to $2.5 million less than Oppenheimer’s opening ($80m vs $82.5m). It didn’t have an 8-month marketing campaign. It didn’t have Nolan or the atomic bomb or BarbieHeimer. Not an Oscar movie. Not a masterpiece. Not a movie that screamed for you to see it on a Premium screen. Would Five Nights at Freddy's have done better in the summer? Probably not. Would Oppenheimer have done as well or better in the Opening Weekend slot of the summer? Probably not.
It’s easy to shrug and take the date for granted. But it is a serious part of the release of every film aside from some giant franchise IP, which draws an audience to pretty much any date.
Last year was a great year for Universal. But drilling down a little, they scored contextual home runs with marketing and dating with M3GAN and Cocaine Bear, maximizing both. And then they missed in the same genre with Knock at The Cabin and Renfield and then, at the end of the summer, with The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Did the studio forget how to sell horror thrillers for a few months and then remember again with Five Nights at Freddy's? Of course not.
The question of “what was wrong with the marketing?” is one that has surely kept execs up at night… but is impossible to answer conclusively. Choices were made and from there on, you can only really try to get the ball rolling downhill as effectively as you can.
There is not a single statistic about The Fall Guy that suggests that it could open the summer to $50 million or more. Deadpool and Wolverine was originally slotted into that summer opener slot, as best I recall, and moved because they needed some extra time after The Strikes (which I keep reminding, only lasted as long as they did because the studios chose not to negotiate for long periods of time).
Why did Universal jump on this date? I say, circumstance and hubris. The movie was completed at the end of last August. They were slotted into March, which to be fair, got overrun by movie refugees from 2023, either unfinished or fearful about opening without talent for publicity. Dune II landed on top of where The Fall Guy was meant to launch.
That was the circumstance.
Here is the hubris. When Deadpool & Wolverine moved off on May 3, they leapt at the slot last November.
The studio skipped January and February altogether, opened Panda 5 in March, then 2 April films, Monkey Man and Abigail. They have 2 movies in July, nothing in June, and nothing in August.
Clearly, they really like the film. Clearly, they had their heads turned by the Oscar-nominated co-stars of Barbie and Oppenheimer. Maybe less clearly, they convinced themselves that they could break norms as they felt they had with Oppenheimer. (I think it was a brilliant campaign… and that Nolan has a track record of opening films that outperformed what you might expect from the ideas for the films. So maybe the marketing was not the first or exclusive key there… great and committed as it was)
I repeat… there is not a single statistic about The Fall Guy that suggests that it could open the summer to $50 million or more.
I should mention David Leitch. Here is his directorial history of openings:
Deadpool 2 - $126 million
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw - $60 million
Bullet Train - $30 million
Atomic Blonde - $18 million
I like a lot of his work. But $18m with Charlize kicking ass, $30m with Brad Pitt kicking ass, a disappointing $60m for The Rock and Statham spinning off of F&F, and the home run, $126m launch of Deadpool… TWO.
Lots of stars who do open movies… and the 2 original films opened at $30m & under and the sequels did summer-y numbers.
None of this is an aspersion on the talent or the movies… or the marketing departments.
And sometimes, there are movies in which 1 plus 1 equaled 10, to everyone’s happy surprise. The film business is loaded with surprises. But that kind of surprise is as rare as rare gets.
Maybe they knew a $100 million opening was well out of reach, but $50 million wouldn’t hurt and the movie would leg out something great.
Last summer, Paramount and Disney got the crap kicked out of them for months for opening to $55 million and $60 million… but they had Cruise and Indiana Jones. And the media was so worked up last summer, they smacked around Guardian 3’s $118 million first-of-summer opening. But they wouldn’t do that to their beloved Ryan and Emily, would they?
There are also things that are out of the hands of the studio once a movie has been made. In the case of The Fall Guy, it is my take that they made Emily Blunt’s character an active part of Gosling’s character’s journey way too late in the movies. Her character was there from the opening moments, but he spends most of the movie trying to solve a mystery and she doesn’t know this until the middle of the 3rd act. Aside from my opinion as a critic, there is the issue of how marketing handles the film. The closest thing they had to establish them sharing in the action was dialogue screamed from a truck to a fast-driving camera crane. Watch your Howard Hawks… the lovers stuck in hijinks need to be together!!!
So what was the movie they were selling? Lots of stunt action. Narrow audience. A romance that didn’t really play in a trailer as a romance. What is Ryan trying to figure out in the film? Won’t tell us in the trailer… which I believe was a secret not worth keeping as the audience seems to get it a full act before Gosling’s character in the film.
Universal was left selling the audience’s romance with Gosling and Blunt. Smokey & The Bandit and Hooper… Burt and Sally Field. The problem is, Burt Reynolds spent years developing that persona that exploded when combined with a serious, popular actress who was likable. Fuzz, White Lightening, The Longest Yard, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Hustle, Gator… just 1 of which was really a terrific movie. He was the white trash guy who got it over on The Man. He did some more serious films… some really fine work. But when Smokey happened - on a very small budget - it all came together after years of building it. The laugh, the romance, the silly premise (getting a load of Coors across country in a short timeframe), the CB radio craze. And of course, Jackie Gleason, who served a similar unexpected magic role as Sir John Gielgud did in Arthur a few years later.
Emily makes for a fantastic - maybe better - Sally Field. But the movie doesn’t really give her that chance. In Smokey, Sally’s character runs away from her wedding to a cop and falls for the rebel smart ass in the fast car. In The Fall Guy, Emily’s character is on the fence about Ryan’s character for almost the entire movie. I’d be happy to see that movie. It would be a lot of fun… and cost about $40 million to make without making any concessions at all. But that is not the basis for a summer epic. Sorry.
In conclusion… I believe that marketing departments often get too much blame for not being able to see what they are trying to sell to expectations. As I whip the horse to the finish in my brain, I am committed to the idea that there is a solution to every marketing problem. But in many cases, this is just not true.
There is what I think is terrible marketing that leads to hits. There is great marketing that I see that leads to flops. There is great marketing that is just the wrong marketing and bad marketing that tickles a very small percentage of the audience… who then all show up. There is a lot of mediocre marketing. These people are professionals with a lot of experience by the time they become leaders. Some are better than others. Some are careful and win… others are revolutionary and lose… and vice versa.
You want to see balls pitched right down the middle? Inside Out 2, A Quiet Place: Day One, and Despicable Me 4. Openings matter… but holds on all of these will matter even more. And international. True sequels or Franchise movies don’t always open, but they are right there, big fat balls up the middle.
Horizon, much less so… but unless it opens to single-digits, we might see that movie have a serious hold in a lot of the same places that came out to see Passion of the Christ. Or not. I don’t know what is being spent and in what way. But this seems like a movie for every place but the big cities on the coasts.
In July, Fly Me to The Moon, curveball (but the only comedy and certainly the only romantic comedy of the summer). Twisters, curveball (old IP, no stars, not unfamiliar CG). Deadpool & Wolverine, fastball right up the gut… even with an R rating.
I hope that clears things up a bit.
Until tomorrow…
This is all amazing, especially the little details such as how Burt Reynolds built the Smokey character across all those movies (one could argue he also built a type of movie that could exist without him; HOT STUFF, I'd say, is part of the RCU).
Here's a question: Summer didn't exist before JAWS. Does it still exist? Does it need to? It's not like TV seasons really matter any more (says the person binging SHOGUN on his DVR with FARGO 5 next up). And does opening box office have any correlation with success in a world of streaming and a time when going to the movies is as much of a stressful and expensive a pain in the ass as going to the airport?
Side note: I watched THE FALL GUY on TV as a kid, but that makes me no more likely to see the movie than if they made one based on TJ HOOKER.