The blockbuster season has officially started: Hollywood is once again bringing the loudest spectacle films of the year to cinemas this summer. Superheroes dominated for a long time, but we are now in a different, uncertain era. This time Hollywood kicked off the festivities with The Fall Guy, an action comedy in which Ryan ‘Ken’ Gosling plays a retired stuntman who makes a comeback on the film set of his directing ex-girlfriend. Colleague Coen van Zwol’s review was not so positive, although I enjoyed it more than he did. Since it’s underrated The Nice Guys I have a soft spot for Gosling in clumsy-comic mode. The room where I was sitting also seemed satisfied, there was even some cautious cheering at the end.
In the US went The Fall Guy premiered this weekend, a week after the Netherlands. There were already fears in advance of disappointing yields. The film cost around 130 million dollars and should therefore really score. What people feared happened: the weekend revenue was only 27.7 million dollars (worldwide the counter is 65.4 million). A bad result, despite impressive PR activities by Gosling, who after his role in Barbie is at the height of his fame. The 43-year-old Canadian attended one talk show after another. With Jimmy Kimmel he even did a little action scene with his stuntmen (“I can’t stop stunting, Jimmy”).
He even managed to score a big internet hit with a sketch in the famous Saturday Night Live (SNL). Gosling played a man who looks suspiciously like Beavis from the cartoon Beavis and Butt Head and thus disrupts a discussion program – especially when another man in the audience appears to be a clone of Butt-Head. A typical SNL sketch that goes on one joke too long. But in this case it worked, because the other players in the skit couldn’t contain their laughter.
On the red carpet of The Fall Guy the joke was once again exploited: Gosling and comedian Mikey Day (Butt-Head) also walked around ‘lost’ as the characters, something that was shared en masse on social media. Funny, but it didn’t translate into more movie tickets sold. The general public did not feel the urge to go to the film itself.
Barbenheimer’s success last year and Dune: Part Two this year proves that people really still want to go to the cinema. But it must feel like a must see and that was it The Fall Guy not the case. “The trailer screamed Netflix,” someone wrote on Threads. “Glossy streaming fodder for a Tuesday evening, not something for a cinema.”
A brief look at the blockbuster agenda does not immediately give hope for the rest of the summer. Published this week Kingdom of the Planet of the Apeslater this month Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. And after that? Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Twisters, A Quiet Place: Day One, Alien: Romulus, Deadpool & Wolverine and a sequel to the eighties hit Beetlejuice.
Gosling will probably wonder if it’s time for that live action version of Beavis and Butt Head to make.
I say: Ryan, don’t do it.
Thijs Schrik is a film and series critic.
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