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Breaking down the year's most shocking box office flop!
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00:00Hey everyone, Ewan for War Culture here, and Summer Blockbuster season formally kicked off
00:04this past weekend with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt's new action comedy The Fall Guy, which
00:10on paper had a hell of a lot going for it. From the sheer likability of its two leads,
00:16who are both fresh off colossal hits in Barbie and Oppenheimer respectively,
00:20to the clout of director David Leitch, who worked on Deadpool 2 and Bullet Train,
00:25and the film's strong reception from critics, they seemingly had every ingredient it needed to be
00:31a bona fide commercial smash. And so, alarm bells began ringing when The Fall Guy opened to a
00:38disappointing $28 million in North America, far below original projections, which placed the film
00:45as high as $40 million. This pretty brutal underperformance ultimately makes it nigh and
00:51impossible for The Fall Guy to turn a profit theatrically, unfortunately kicking the
00:56cinematic summer off with a bit of a flop and casting a bit of a dampener on things after the
01:01great vibes of films like Challenges, Love Life's Bleeding, Dune 2, and also the re-release of
01:07The Phantom Menace. We can't forget that either. But how did such a sure thing, seemingly, end up
01:13faltering so unexpectedly? Well, by considering every facet of The Fall Guy's creation and release,
01:20a clearer picture emerges of precisely what led it to fall flat at the box office.
01:25Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt aren't box office draws.
01:30Though Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are certainly popular actors, they're actually not box office
01:36draws in and of themselves, with neither actor having a single mega hit to their name that was
01:42marketed primarily on their star power alone. Even though the duo are fresh off the biggest hits of
01:48their careers in Barbie and Oppenheimer respectively, neither film was sold or made bank because of
01:54their name being attached. They're well known and liked obviously, but they aren't putting butts
01:59in seats the same way the stars of Yor did. Furthermore, both have their fair share of big
02:06budget and performances under their belt. Most prominently, Blade Runner 2049 and The Nice Guys
02:12for Gosling and Edge of Tomorrow for Blunt. So, The Fall Guys lackluster opening weekend isn't
02:19actually anything new for them. This is ultimately part of a much wider recent trend in Hollywood though,
02:26where contemporary audiences are considerably less swayed to see a film the strength of an A-list star,
02:32and are all about the franchises and IP. An issue we have both the studios to blame for,
02:38and also just shifting viewership habits. So, even with their singular charms and obvious chemistry,
02:47Gosling and Blunt were not enough to convince people to leave their house and buy a movie ticket
02:52on opening weekend. It's a reboot of an IP no one cared about. Ask the average person if they even
03:00know
03:00that the Fall Guy is based on an existing IP, and they'll probably look at you blankly,
03:06or just immediately think of the game Fall Guys instead, which, fair, that thing rocks.
03:11But indeed, the movie is based loosely on the 1980s Lee Majors starring TV series of the same name.
03:19Yet, when this branding is basically unknown to most people under the age of 40,
03:25does it in any way help the film from a commercial perspective?
03:28In an era where franchises are all the rage, and you generally need to be a recognisable IP
03:34to open big at the box office, rolling the dice on a 40 plus year old series that a large
03:41portion
03:41of the target audience has never heard of is... well, it's definitely a choice.
03:46And so, the utter lack of visibility for this film's source material did it no favors at all when it
03:52came
03:53to planting its flag in the perilous financial landscape of big budget cinema. And speaking of which...
04:00The budget is way too big. Last year it felt like something of a reckoning for irresponsibly
04:07budgeted movies at the box office, given the sheer number of colossally priced and polls that
04:13underperformed or outright flopped. Looking at you, Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny.
04:18But even if you put an asterisk next to some of 2023's movies due to pandemic related cost increases,
04:25it doesn't seem like Hollywood is learning its lesson in 2024.
04:30The Fall Guys production budget has been estimated at anywhere from $125 million to $150 million,
04:37and even if we generously accept the lower number, the 2.5 rule dictates that it needs to gross just
04:43north of $300 million worldwide to turn a profit. That's a high degree of exposure for an action
04:51comedy releasing in the current theatrical climate, and a figure which it now has no hope of reaching
04:58during its big screen run. Given the film's emphasis on practical stunt work, it truly feels
05:04like Universal should have been able to reduce The Fall Guys for considerably less than $125 million.
05:09Like how have we gone away from the days of the mid-tier budget action blockbuster from the 90s
05:15and early 2000s? We really need those again. $100 million or $80 million with some scaled down
05:22set pieces would have greatly less than the film's need to be a mega hit, but once again Hollywood
05:28egregiously overspent on a project while also overestimating audience demand.
05:34Unremarkable marketing. Poor marketing has seen the commercial prospects of many a good movie,
05:41and while The Fall Guys trailers weren't awful, they were rather generic and blissless. Like,
05:47you can't tell me you also didn't look at this thing and thought it was another inessential,
05:51overly CGI'd, irreverent action film that we've gotten way too many of since the beginning of the 2010s.
05:58By focusing on the broadest possible action comedy beats but being suspiciously vague about the plot,
06:04which is far more of a murder mystery than implied, the marketing didn't really cement this movie as
06:10a surefire must-see on the big screen. It didn't help that Universal also released the first trailer
06:16a whole six months prior to release, because as Argyle proved a few months ago, nothing sad as an
06:23audience's desire to see a movie quite like being subjected to the same trailer over and over and
06:29over again for months at a time. By the time audiences had been shown that Bon Jovi scored
06:36trailer for The Fall Guy a couple dozen times, they'd grown a bit tired of the whole idea and
06:41honestly, I can't blame them. It probably didn't help that the film ended up being delayed from March to
06:47May shortly after that first trailer dropped and so, in retrospect, Universal probably would have
06:53been smart to hold back their marketing push until the start of this year instead of the end of last.
06:59Also, if we've learned anything from the Bob and Heimer phenomenon from last year,
07:04it's that audiences will turn out if it's something essential or unique. Fall Guy looked like any generic
07:11straight-to-streaming action movie you can find browsing aimlessly on Netflix or Prime, not a
07:17cinematic event that needed to be seen on the biggest screen possible. Universal's PVOD Strategy
07:25It's often said that since the pandemic massively reduced the theatrical window before new movies
07:31hit streaming, audiences have effectively been conditioned to wait for most films to land at home
07:36rather than heading out to see them themselves. And this is definitely the case with movies that
07:42don't have a hugely invigorating hook or simply look just okay. Why roll the dice on a bad night out
07:50of the movies when you can watch it considerably cheaper in the comfort of your own home mere weeks
07:55later? And Universal has been leading the charge in this regard with their aggressive premium VOD Strategy,
08:02where most of their movies which gross less than $50 million domestically,
08:05in their opening weekend are sent to PVOD in just 18 days, while even those which go north of $50
08:12million will typically get there in just a month. And so, knowing that Universal will likely be sending
08:19the Fall Guy to streaming barely two weeks after it lands in cinemas, why deal with the hassle of
08:25splashing out on tickets, driving to the cinema, buying food and drink there and perhaps having to hire
08:32a babysitter for the night when you can just do none of that and watch it at home 18 days
08:37later?
08:38Like Warner Bros and Disney did in the midst of the pandemic, it essentially kneecaps a movie's box
08:43on its prospects before it's even premiered. The Bad Release Day. Look, it doesn't really matter
08:50how good a movie is if the release day is bad, and that's yet another area where the Fall Guy
08:56has suffered.
08:57While its original March 1st they would have seen it ill-advisedly go head to head with Dune Part 2,
09:04moving all the way to May didn't position it much better, considering the number of more highly
09:09anticipated blockbusters releasing throughout the rest of the month. From Kingdom of the Planet
09:14Apes to Furiosa, this consistent competition ensures there's really no path for the Fall Guy to enjoy a
09:21leggy steady box office run and keep bringing in the money weekend after weekend. Universal would
09:27have surely been better off releasing it in mid-March, where it could have been a few weeks
09:31removed from Dune Part 2, but its only major direct competition would have been Ghostbusters Frozen
09:36Empire, which ended up underperforming itself. Instead of that though, its ultimate release date
09:42has basically guaranteed that its box office legs will collapse in as little as a week, and it's got
09:48virtually no chance of staging an Elemental-esque comeback. And finally, audiences are tightening
09:55their belts. And finally, there's the unescapable fact that many people globally are struggling to
10:02deal with brutal inflation rates while not receiving wage increases to reflect this, as well as soaring
10:08utility bills. Life is pretty hard for a lot of people right now, and so if you're only able to
10:15intrigue yourself to see maybe 3 or 4 movies at the cinema a year, are you really going to pick
10:20a
10:21merely decent-ish looking action comedy when you've got busier deep dish prospects like Dune Part 2,
10:27Deadpool, and Wolverine, and Furiosa to look forward to? And the Fall Guy is certainly no outlier in this
10:34regard. 2024 has been a hugely underwhelming year at the box office so far for smaller and bigger films
10:41alike, with even the ultra-reliable horror genre underperforming relative to expectations.
10:48It's a wider sign that Vassois and the general public don't have masses of disposable income right
10:54now, and certainly not to spend on something as fleeting and arguably overpriced as a cinema ticket,
11:00especially when you can save some dough and cash it at home in the very near future.
11:05With that all in mind, it'll certainly be interesting to see how some of the year's most anticipated upcoming
11:11blockbusters actually perform, but from where we're sitting currently, it doesn't seem like 2024
11:16is going to be a banner year for the industry, at least as far as box office books are concerned.
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