A 2024 Ryan Gosling Flop Is Finally Finding Its Audience On Amazon Prime Video

Warner Bros

Movie stardom is incredibly difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to maintain. Once an actor finds that breakthrough role, they're immediately faced with the challenge of giving their fans what they want while also, depending on their level of ambition, taking on roles that will hopefully expand their range (or at the very least keep them from getting stuck in a creative rut). Some actors correctly identify that their audience isn't looking for much in the way of variance (John Wayne is a perfect example of this), while others are determined to throw a curveball here and there (as Sylvester Stallone's unwisely did with poorly received comedies like "Rhinestone" and "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot"). Mess with expectations too much, and the fans will stop trusting you to deliver.

Wayne and Stallone at least had a go-to mode of movie they could return to as needed to satisfy their audiences. Meanwhile, a star like Ryan Gosling has to take it picture by picture because he broke through via critical acclaim before connecting commercially. For those of us who didn't get to know Gosling as a Mouseketeer on "The All New Mickey Mouse Club," he exploded out of nowhere in 2001 with his fierce portrayal of a Jewish skinhead in Henry Bean's "The Believer." His first taste of Hollywood stardom arrived three years later when he steamed up the nation's multiplexes opposite Rachel McAdams in "The Notebook." From there, Gosling has remained a critical favorite by taking on wildly different characters (consider the gulf between "Lars and the Real Girl" and "Drive"), while his more commercial efforts ("Gangster Squad" and "The Nice Guys") have come up short at the box office.

After scoring a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his winningly silly performance as Ken in Greta Gerwig's mega-blockbuster "Barbie," it felt like Gosling had finally threaded that needle of commercial and critical adoration. Surely, he'd be bankable from this point forward. Not quite. Or, actually, maybe. It all depends on how the industry wants to read the delayed popularity of "The Fall Guy."

Universal

According to FlixPatrol, "The Fall Guy" is currently the most viewed movie on Amazon Prime Video after debuting there last week. This places it above two other box office underperformers in "Red One" and "The Creator," and more conventionally successful films like "The Equalizer 2" and "A Quiet Place: Day One."

While "The Fall Guy" wasn't a commercial wipeout with its $181 million worldwide haul, it certainly lost Universal a considerable amount of money due to a budget that's estimated to be somewhere in the $125 million to $150 million range. Even though critics generally liked the film (/Film's Jacob Hall loved it), moviegoers just didn't flock to theaters showing the action-comedy that kicked off the 2024 summer movie season. Whether this was due to most viewers being unfamiliar with the television series it was based on ("The Fall Guy" ended its network run in 1986) or just not being in the mood for a film about a stunt guy (in which case, shame on them), those box office numbers don't lie.

On the plus side, people who did see "The Fall Guy" theatrically quite enjoyed it (it received an A- Cinemascore), and there's no reason to believe it's playing differently at home. I'm still shocked that it didn't catch on initially, but maybe mainstream audiences only show up when Gosling is playing a hunky romantic lead or a blazingly beautiful himbo. It's a bizarre place for one of the most appealing movie stars working today to find himself.