The 2024 Summer Movies Most Likely to Be the Hit ‘Fall Guy’ Couldn’t
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The summer movie season kicked off last weekend with Universal’s “The Fall Guy,” a big-budget action comedy pairing Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt after their respective supporting turns in “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”
However, there was no “Barbenheimer” magic to be found, putting immense pressure on “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” to evolve the box office this weekend.
“The Fall Guy” opened to just under $28 million domestically, starting the summer with a whimper, despite critical embrace at SXSW. The April-May weekend cusp has historically been the launch window for summer’s biggest blockbusters — often Marvel films — and resumed that reputation by 2022 after the COVID shutdowns, making Gosling and Blunt’s outing a sobering reminder of the box office’s susceptibility to unusual breaks from routine.
This time it’s the lingering impact of last year’s dual Hollywood strikes. With production schedules backed up, fewer films have been hitting theaters, and only the “Dune 2” release weekend in March exceeded the gross of its equivalent weekend in 2023.
Likewise, every Marvel film planned for this year was pushed back to 2025 — except one.
Due in July, Marvel and 20th Century’s “Deadpool and Wolverine” is projected by Guggenheim and HSX analysts to earn $350 million in its first four weeks domestically, which would make it the film of the summer, if not the year.
Notably, the same analysts thought ”The Fall Guy” would be capable of hitting the $150 million mark over the same timeframe, leaving it with much work to do after its lackluster opening, though its diminished audience did respond positively to the film.
Before the “Deadpool” sequel hits theaters, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” will test the vitality of the 20th Century label as a hitmaker between “Avatar” films, following its 2019 move to Disney from former parent Fox Corp. Its March projection was actually slightly worse than “The Fall Guy,” likely due to the lack of A-list talent to complement the CGI apes this go-round, and it’ll be sidelined by audiences when “Furiosa,” George Miller’s follow-up to “Mad Max: Fury Road,” arrives later this month.
Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” and Illumination’s “Despicable Me 4” are better bets for summer success if “Kung Fu Panda 4” is anything to go by. It’s been eight years since the Jack Black-led animated kids franchise was in theaters, but its fourth incarnation has already passed $500 million globally.
The last “Despicable Me” doubled that amount, while the first “Inside Out” made well over $800 million and can’t be accused of overstaying anyone’s welcome when its first sequel is coming out nine years later.
Even so, nine years is nothing compared with several films getting their first follow-ups soon. A sequel to the 1996 bad-weather thriller, “Twisters” arrives in July, followed by “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” in September and “Gladiator 2” in November. The latter two do have Tim Burton and Ridley Scott, respectively, at the helm, and “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” managed to pass the $100 million domestic mark earlier this year, so they have a shot at matching their projections.
If they don’t, the rest of the year looks bleak. A sequel to 2019’s “Joker” and another live-action “Lion King” should do well enough, but there are multiple weekends in the last quarter with no major-studio effort booked.
It’s possible smaller distributors such as Angel Studios, A24 and Neon can make good use of these gaps, but Angel’s “Cabrini” was a far cry from the success of its “Sound of Freedom” last year, and A24’s “Civil War” is falling short of matching the success of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” at more than twice that film’s budget, per Comscore data.
Until then, it’s up to Disney’s acquired apes to settle the score and get the summer swinging.
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