Box Office 'Apes' Opens to $129M as 'Fall Guy' Falls Hard But 'Challengers' Holds

Disney hopes that 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes' will leg out as a rare PG-13 live-action franchise biggie in a weirdly R-rated summer movie season

While The Fall Guy still wouldn’t be a hit in terms of rate-of-return, I do wonder if its “mere” $27.7 million domestic debut might have been slightly better received had it opened this weekend while Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes debuted last weekend as a conventional summer kick-off flick. The Ryan Gosling/Emily Blunt action comedy arguably looked and felt more like a second-weekend-of-summer non-franchise female-skewing counterprogramming offering, closer in spirit to Monster-In-Law ($24 million in 2005) and Unfaithful ($15 million in 2002 — $26 million adjusted for inflation) than Van Helsing ($54 million in 2004) or Mission: Impossible III ($47 million in 2006). I like that Universal went for it in terms of positioning it and selling it as an event movie. That’s often what Donna Langley’s Universal has done best (selling potential counterprogramming as A-level event movies) with the likes of Straight Outta Compton and Oppenheimer. It didn’t work here, but Universal is probably the only studio that could have rolled the dice with minimal macro-consequences.