Box Office: ‘Fall Guy’ Stumbles With $29M Debut as ‘Garfield’ Nabs $22M Overseas

Is the soft opening for David Leitch's $125m Ryan Gosling/Emily Blunt action comedy a confirmation of our grim status quo, the first shot in a slow readjustment or both?

Universal’s The Fall Guy opened with $28.5 million in North America this weekend, alongside a $55 million overseas haul that brought its global total to $65.4 million. The film’s softer-than-hoped opening feels like a collision of factors related to the film itself, specific promotional issues and the grim near-decade-old status quo of audiences only showing up for pre-sold (if not pre-digested) IP-centric franchise fare featuring marquee characters amid established cinematic universes. The crowd-pleasing and delightful action comedy is also the sort of film studios need to keep releasing over the next few years, even if each one doesn’t score, if they ever want to re-acclimate audiences to showing up for non-franchise, star-driven *movies* again. The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt and loosely based on a 1980s TV show, is a definitive confirmation of a grim streaming-era status quo but also perhaps a heroic sacrificial lamb that took the hit so the next one of these might thrive.