Fall Guy Discourse

I saw Fall Guy last night, and in general terms I share the perplexity regarding the film’s lack of box office success; it’s exactly the kind of crowd-pleaser I’d expect to do very well, not perfect but professionally done, with big stars and a plot that’s easy to follow (or at least that moves forward with enough momentum to not particularly care about the specifics. Yet the film has thus far turned in a relatively disappointing performance. Matt Singer (via an equally perplexed Dan Drezner):

A consultant quoted in Variety’s piece characterized The Fall Guy’s opening weekend as “fair” and said it “is going to need a long run” in theaters to turn a profit. And maybe that’s what it will have; The Fall Guy is the sort of crowdpleaser that tends to hang around theaters for a while. (It got a very solid A- CinemaScore from paying customers last weekend.) I have no doubt that over time The Fall Guy will turn into one of those movies that everyone has seen and likes, and many people pretend they were fans of right from the start, even though they only caught it on streaming way after the fact.

But The Fall Guy really shouldn’t need to desperately eke out a meager profit on the strength of its word-of-mouth. This isn’t some abstruse art film or an ambiguous exploration of the meaning of life; it’s a big, fun, funny, exciting, romantic action movie. It’s got sharp dialogue, strong chemistry between the stars (actual movie stars!), a fun mystery, magnetic lead performances, and terrific stunt work.

While The Fall Guy’s not perfect (and I personally would not have invested $140 million of my money in it), it is the sort of film I think you could take almost anyone to assured they would have at least a solidly good time. It’s almost the platonic ideal of what Hollywood executives describe as a “four-quadrant movie,” i.e. a film that should appeal to men and women over and under the age of 25. I could see my parents enjoying The Fall Guy, and if my kids were maybe two years older I would absolutely take them to see it too; it’s action-packed but not excessively bloody or violent. The sparks flying off the screen between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt could give electric shocks to the viewers in the theater’s first couple rows, but there’s not much profanity and barely any sexual innuendo…

That’s what I find so baffling — and even somewhat disheartening — about The Fall Guy’s struggles. Here you have exactly the sort of movie that people claim to want to see; the sort of thing they don’t make very often any more, with beautiful movie stars flirting and bantering and getting into all sorts of amusing scrapes. It’s not bleak or depressing. It doesn’t make you work too hard, but it also doesn’t insult your intelligence. It’s not a sequel or a reboot and it requires no homework; yes, The Fall Guy is loosely based on an old TV show, but you don’t need to know anything about it to enjoy the film. (I should know; I have never seen an episode of The Fall Guy in my life.)

The answers here, I suspect, are depressingly straightforward; during the pandemic a lot of folks invested in big TVs and home theater systems and lost the taste for going out to see a film that will appear in their living room in just a few months (or weeks). Folks SAY that they want stories in the theater that aren’t part of corporate IP (which Fall Guy of course sort of is), but what people say in surveys or on talk shows is often different from what they say with their money.

FWIW I quite enjoyed Fall Guy, although I’ll confess to a certain wistfulness regarding the decision to nod towards the Lee Majors’ series while adopting an entirely distinct tone. Ryan Gosling has become, I think, my favorite contemporary actor, and Emily Blunt was similarly terrific. Regarding Gosling I do worry just a touch about his turn towards physicality; Hollywood actors can, ironically enough, get too large and too fit to be believable in certain kinds of roles. Bruce Willis went this direction with the latter half of his career, to immense financial and minimal aesthetic success. Dave Bautista seems committed to downsizing in order to be taken more seriously as a dramatic actor (and I very much think he has the chops to pull off serious dramatic roles). Dwayne Johnson is probably a lost cause at this point because his size and physique are so central to his film presence, but he’s a far better actor that the roles he decides to take. Gosling seems smart enough to avoid these issues (and I think that his performance in Barbie is a rare, near-perfect union of acting chops and physical presence) but I can still see him getting typecast, notwithstanding his awesome and obvious talent.

BTW, here’s the entire 1979 film Steel, filmed in Lexington starring Lee Majors (let’s revisit his Kentucky history). Steel was famous for the death of stunt man A.J. Bakunas, making a (for the time) record-setting jump off the 22 story Kincaid Towers.