Do you like action movies? Do you like the ones where a bunch of crazy nonsense is happening that seems like it defies all the laws of physics? Do you like video games? Good news, all three of those itches are going to be scratched with an adaptation of the Just Cause games.
Will the Fallout TV Series Radiate the Tone of the Video Games?
Per the Hollywood Reporter, Universal’s picked up the rights to the open-world franchise and enlisted Blue Beetle’sÁngel Manuel Soto to direct. Action movie studio 87North will produce the film via Kelly McCormick and action guy David Leitch, coming off the heels of The Fall Guy from earlier in May. Also producing is Story Kitchen, a company that’s already involved in the recent live-action adaptations of Tomb Raider and Sonic the Hedgehog.
The Just Cause games center on Rico Rodriguez, a secret agent tasked with traveling to various islands and saving the people by overthrowing the current regime of whover’s in charge. Since 2006, the series has been well-liked, largely due to the sequels enabling players to create as much carnage as they can by destroying government property with whatever they’ve got on hand. The stories are cliche and not all that interesting, but the games make up for it by allowing players to wreak havoc and pull off some wild death-defying stunts with Rico’s handy grappling hook and wingsuit. If you can imagine a Mission Impossible game that doesn’t take itself all that seriously, that’s basically these games.
Interestingly, a movie adaptation was reportedly getting off the ground back in 2010 (the same year Just Cause 2 released), but nothing came of it. In 2017, Jason Momoa was tapped to play Rico in an adaptation from Atlas director Brad Peyton, which also never happened since at the point, the two were both individually pretty busy. After another false start in 2020, it looks like the stars have aligned for a movie to finally happen. Now if only there were a game along with it: the last entry was Just Cause 4 back in 2018, and Avalanche is currently working on the open-world co-op game Contraband for Xbox, which we haven’t really heard much about since its initial reveal in 2021.
After the many industry-wide challenges of the last four years, The Fall Guy screenwriter Drew Pearce just wanted to make a feel-good Friday night movie, and based on various metrics, the consensus among critics and audiences is that he and the rest of his collaborators succeeded. In ten years, the social framing around the David Leitch-directed movie won’t be that it opened to $27.7 million instead of a projected $30 million. Rather, the impression of a good action romcom will remain above all.
Pearce is no stranger to IP-driven films, as he’s officially written for Marvel Studios’ Iron Man 3, the fifth Mission: Impossible film, Rogue Nation, as well as the Fast & Furious spinoff, Hobbs and Shaw. That also doesn’t include all the cups of coffee he’s had with other franchises in an uncredited capacity. So, compared to the aforementioned IP, the assumption is that The Fall Guy, based on a largely forgotten ‘80s TV series, would be a walk in the park, creatively, since it doesn’t have the same expectations and same number of voices involved. However, Pearce likens his liberating experience on The Fall Guy to the film you’d least expect, Iron Man 3.
“I know that will sound surprising, but at that point, certainly as a creative team, Marvel was still just making a gigantic [John] Cassavetes movie,” Pearce tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Nobody but [director/co-wrtier] Shane [Black] and I touched a keyboard for the entire two-and-a-half years. So, naively, as my first big Hollywood job, I thought that’s how franchises work, and of course, I was disabused of that idea frequently, almost every time, in fact, over the following decade. So, The Fall Guy, though not exactly the same, had a very small group of us pushing the creative.”
In The Fall Guy, Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers, the titular fall guy, which is an industry term for stunt man. And when his former leading man, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), accidentally kills Colt’s replacement stunt man, Ryder and his unsavory producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) hatch a plan to make Colt the literal fall guy. But together with his ex-girlfriend turned director, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), Colt captures Tom’s hot mic confession on set, leading to a last-minute recast in Metalstorm, the fictional movie within the movie that Jody is trying to rescue. The Fall Guy then closes with a scene inside San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H, as Jody unveils the fictional trailer for her sci-fi Western that now stars Jason Momoa as the central Space Cowboy character.
“We knew that we would replace Tom Ryder in the [fictional] movie, but we didn’t know who our replacement person would be. So we just got incredibly lucky that everyone knows Jason and that he was around and available,” Pearce says. “This is a guy who, at the L.A. premiere, when he saw himself in the Space Cowboy role, he literally stood up and did the same roar in the audience that he was doing on screen.”
In 2013, on the heels of Iron Man 3’s $1.2 billion box office gross, Pearce was hired to write Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and while he gives full credit to director Christopher McQuarrie and star Tom Cruise, he’s especially proud of creating an embryonic version of the character that would later become Rebecca Ferguson’s fan-favorite spy, Ilsa Faust. Unfortunately, Ilsa’s tenure with IMF came to an end in last summer’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, and Pearce, like the rest of the audience, is heartbroken by the story point, reminding him of a death he briefly considered during the early days of Rogue Nation.
“Weirdly, killing Benji was actually something I debated at the beginning of RogueNation,” Pearce recalls of his experience that ultimately landed him a story credit. “Simon Pegg, if you’re reading, I apologize, but you are the easiest person to fridge in a weird way, because you have one of the longest relationships with Ethan. But I don’t think there’s a political repercussion for fridging him. It’s just an emotional one, which is what you want.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Pearce also discusses the realities of being a professional screenwriter and how they, too, can be a fall guy for choices they didn’t necessarily make.
You’ve written in a number of franchises such as the MCU, Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious, as well as others that are both known and unknown. Of course, The Fall Guy is based on an ‘80s TV series, but it’s highly unlikely that it had to contend with the same number of voices, cooks and notes as those others. It’s still a well-funded movie that isn’t going to be ignored, but was this a relatively freeing experience in comparison?
It was actually relatively similar to my very first franchise experience on Iron Man 3. I know that will sound surprising, but at that point, certainly as a creative team, Marvel was still just making a gigantic [John] Cassavetes movie. It was me, [director/co-writer] Shane Black, Kevin Feige, Robert Downey Jr. and my executive. That was it. Literally every decision and every note came from there. Of course, there was Ike [Perlmutter] and a layer of bureaucracy and notary, but at that point, Kevin was in so much control — despite the fact that it wasn’t the politic — that we did what we wanted.
So that was my first franchise movie, and it’s actually my first produced credit, I think, for a movie. And what was fascinating about that was I was the first person on and the last person out, and nobody but Shane and I touched a keyboard for the entire two-and-a-half years. So, naively, as my first big Hollywood job, I thought that’s how franchises work, and of course, I was disabused of that idea frequently, almost every time, in fact, over the following decade. So, The Fall Guy, though not exactly the same, had a very small group of us pushing the creative. We’re all at this point quite seasoned in our different filmmaking areas, and it also had that kind of blockbuster cottage industry vibe that I first tasted [on Iron Man 3].
Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy
Universal Pictures
The common refrain around The Fall Guy is that it’s a love letter to the stunt community.
You heard that talking point!?
Only a few thousand times now.
(Laughs.)
But at the same time, can it be said that it’s also an indictment of movie stars who believe their own press?
I wouldn’t go that hard. I’m from England — well, Scotland, actually — but I never knew anyone in the business. So when I came here, everyone was like, “Oh no, that’s an apocryphal story. That stuff doesn’t happen.” But my experience is that literally anything that is supposedly apocryphal is absolutely commonplace. It happens not just once, but all the time, to the degree that you can think of the wildest, most apocryphal-sounding story, and it has definitely happened. Now, I’m not suggesting that anyone I’ve ever worked with has murdered their stunt double, but honestly, if that story came out, you’d be like, “Yeah, that’s probably true.” A lack of carbs is very damaging to your cognitive processing. (Laughs.) So it’s strange to be able to play in a world that is both so pushed and so ludicrous, whilst also being in the realms of feasibility.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Tom Ryder in The Fall Guy
Universal Studios
But plenty of movie stars have to uphold the narratives that surround them. They may not do it to the degree that Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) does, but sticking to their own legends, as he did, often comes at the expense of someone else.
Yeah, that’s literally The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. “Print the legend.” Movies, in general, are all a game of believe, and ours is a tricky game of believe. We are going to tell you that stunt people are the people behind the movie stars that you watch, but then we’re going to ask you to enjoy a movie star movie and expect to feel the danger that Ryan Gosling himself might be in. It sounds simple, but cognitively, that’s actually kind of a trick. It’s reflective of the entire process of filmmaking, and of course, that applies to the meta narratives of who any given actor is and how they should be received by the public. Honestly, that’s a tradition as long as Hollywood itself, and we’re now in a different version of it. We’re in a version where you have to communicate to people two generations below you through your TikTok performance, rather than through a weekly gossip rag in the ‘40s. But it’s all still a game of believe.
The Fall Guy reminded me a bit of Last Action Hero. They’re partially about the making of action movies, and reality collides with the fictional world in both stories. I also bring it up because I spoke to Scott Waugh last year, and he, like Dave Leitch, is a former stuntman turned director. Moreover, Scott did some stunts for Last Action Hero, while his stuntman father, Fred Waugh, directed second unit. Scott then told me that his father was blamed for that film going over budget, and he said something that really struck a chord: “It made me aware of how quickly a fall guy can become the fall guy.” And that’s literally the plot of your movie.
Totally!
So you normally hear about directors being turned into scapegoats, but how often does it happen to below-the-line folks?
All the time! It doesn’t usually happen in the supersized way of this movie, but below-the-line crew are fired the whole time. And that is because a blood sacrifice is required by somebody above the line, whoever that is: producorial, directorial, but seldom the screenwriter. Not enough power to hire and fire. So I definitely think that is a part of the process, and of course, in the case of a stunt guy or woman, the double jeopardy of it is this whole thing of like, “Oh, and someone could get hurt.” It’s not ephemeral; it’s tangible. And weirdly, that was actually my in to this movie. Strangely enough, the very first day I was thinking about it, I was looking at the title and I was like, “Oh, what if I hid the twist of the movie in plain sight by Trojan horsing the twist through the title?” So, weirdly, it kind of announced itself through the nature of the IP’s name.
A lot of the talk around the movie is the metaness and how it’s about show business and all of those things. But honestly, the thing that I thought worked about this idea of an unknown stuntman is the flip of that, which is the universality of the world that we move through where the unseen carry the can for the one percent literally the whole time. It is our culture. It is capitalism. (Laughs.) It is everything, right? I don’t mean to sound grandiose about that, but I miss blue-collar heroes. The action genre is one that has always reveled in that, and it’s also part of my job. A movie like this needs an underdog at its center, and at its center, I also have the most handsome and funny man in the world. So I had to put a bit of shoe leather into it to get him to the point of feeling like an underdog, and so all of that is in the soup, frankly.
Ryan Gosling is Colt Seavers/Space Cowboy’s Stunt Man in The Fall Guy
Universal Studios
I’ve bumped up against the spelling of Jason Momoa’s last name on plenty of occasions, and that post-it note gave me a highly relatable laugh. I also appreciated that it set up his cameo as the ultimate star of Metalstorm.
Double duty. That’s what you want to be doing.
Did Jody (Emily Blunt) basically pull a Christophher Plummer and reshoot all of Tom’s scenes?
Well, it’s really funny, because originally in the script, there wasn’t a facial replacement element to the setup [that replaces Tom’s face with Colt’s on the incriminating cell phone video]. And so, at the end, Jody used facial replacement to take Tom out of the movie. But we never call it that now because we utilized facial replacement as part of the villain plot. So it felt a wee bit disingenuous to then make it part of the win, and so I like to think that it’s just excellent Christopher Plummer green screening.
Given that your third act was in flux, did you still have the shape of the ending?
The third act was always in flux, but it was the moves that were in flux. From the very first draft, we all knew that this movie ended with Colt and Jody pulling donuts in the Jeep on a beach and getting a cocktail. We also all knew that the Metalstorm trailer reveal, which originally was called Star Fall, would be a part of how we ended the movie. The moves that changed were more about the antagonist and the real world stakes and how high that needed to go. Jody’s involvement also increased so much more once you land Emily Blunt and the movie essentially becomes a two-hander.
Did you guys just happen to catch Momoa while he was also in Australia for Aquaman 2?
We knew that we would replace Tom Ryder in the movie, but we didn’t know who our replacement person would be. So we just got incredibly lucky that everyone knows Jason and that he was around and available. He was happy and excited to do it. In the same way that people get vitamin B shots, Jason is a human vitamin B shot. This is a guy who, at the L.A. premiere, when he saw himself in the Space Cowboy role, he literally stood up and did the same roar in the audience that he was doing on screen.
As much as that’s great as a gag, and it’s also cool that we have Momoa, there’s something really interesting about it. Our fake A-list star is an asshole and a murderer, but the real A-list star that we use to save Jody’s movie is absolutely an angel. By the way, I also like the fact that Metalstorm is actually an old piece of Universal IP that has nothing to do with the Metalstorm that Jody makes, and I like that it reflects the process of how we use IP in our movie.
But honestly, the thing that I love most about the movie is that it’s the best romcom I’ve seen in years, and that has nothing to do with me. I can safely say that it’s because of Ryan, Emily and their full Billy Wilder-level expertise in the genre.
Hannah Waddingham is Gail Meyer in The Fall Guy
Universal Studios
The villainous and utterly despicable producer character of Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) cracks a joke that you guys have gotten some grief over. On its own, domestic violence is obviously no laughing matter, but does the context of who’s saying the joke count for something? Shouldn’t it?
No decent human being would ever make a joke about that subject, and Gail’s character is clearly not a decent human being. She’s our villain, and she says horrible things, and this is just one of them. But just like what I hope continues to happen in our industry and others, Gail is ultimately held accountable for her worldview and her behavior.
As with all of our characters, Gail included, we wanted them to feel authentic, warts and all. Sometimes shitty people say shitty things, but a character’s opinion in a movie is not the same as the perspective of either the film or the people making it. All of that being said, when a filmmaker puts a line in a movie, they have to anticipate how it will make the audience feel, so everybody is entitled to their reaction too.
I’ve never been comfortable with critiquing a script after merely watching a movie, but it’s a pretty common practice nowadays among critics. In my case, I have no idea what the original script looked like, nor do I know how much it changed during filming and editing. As a screenwriter, is it often frustrating when the script is critiqued without anyone actually reading the script that got the greenlight?
In situations where you are being criticized for something that maybe didn’t come from you, then that can be tough. But I would also say there are loads of times where you might get credited for a line that you didn’t write because it’s really fucking great. So there’s a part of me that believes that, at least in the short term, it’s a part of the process. But it is weird, specifically for a screenwriter, for the simple fact that it looks authorial, even though the process of making a movie in no way is ever based on an authorial voice of the screenwriter, even mostly with writer-directors. The nature of a movie’s voice is so director-led, so actor-led, as well as whoever’s at the laptop as well. So I try not to be frustrated by it.
You hear about trilogies not having detailed plans or productions beginning without a third act, and then when a movie doesn’t connect, fans are critical over the lack of a rigid plan. But when last-minute adjustments work out, it’s rarely addressed to that degree. Some of the most defining moments in film were from listening to the movie and following its lead. So why was it necessary for The Fall Guy to also begin shooting with some missing pieces?
Honestly, I don’t think you’re making a movie right if you don’t listen to the movie, and that’s actually the specific phrase I always use. I never quote my own lines, but there is one line in Hotel Artemis that I always come back to. It is ostensibly about bank robbery in that film, but I do think it applies to moviemaking: “You work with what you got, not what you hoped for.” In reality, for a movie, the joy of it is that everything’s a blueprint. Everything’s a plan. Your ideas, your characters, your themes, hopefully all of that stays in there, but until you’re on a location, until you know exactly what you’re doing that day on set, who the people are, who the day players are, what the light is like, you need to listen to what you’ve got every day.
Emily shows up on set, and the chemistry in a two-shot is just absolutely fantastic. So let me see if I can crowbar in some other reason that we can get them to bump into each other in the second act so that I can get some more of that stuff on screen. Of course, you need a draft that gets you greenlit, and then you need a draft that gets everyone onto set and everyone in the same direction. But once you are there, it’s your job to listen to all the component parts together and create the film. If you have the luxury to do it, continue to create the film that the component parts are pushing you towards.
Emily Blunt is Judy Moreno and Ryan Gosling is Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy
Universal Pictures
Late in the game, a gun is pulled on the dog, Jean-Claude. Did Dave suggest that as a nod to the story point that launched his directorial career via John Wick?
That actually speaks to some of the specific stuff from Dave’s life that I wanted to jam into the movie. Other than Dave Bautista, who I also work with, [Dave Leitch] is maybe the biggest dog lover in the world. He adores his dogs.
One of the genius idiosyncrasies of Shane Black happened when I was working on Iron Man 3. There’s a sequence in Iron Man 3 where Air Force One blows out and a whole bunch of people fall out of the back. We called it the “Barrel of Monkeys” sequence, and Iron Man has to somehow save all of them. I pitched it to him, and Shane was like, “I just don’t care about it.” And I was like, “But the President and everyone are blown out of the back of a plane. It’s an impossible situation.” And then he was like, “Give me one second … Oh, that is sad.” And I was like, “What did you do there?” And he was like, “I just imagined all the humans were dogs, because I don’t really like humans, but I love dogs.” And I thought, “God, if you blew 18 dogs out of the back of a plane, that would be a tragedy.” So, apparently, dog jeopardy is simply something that will follow me through my entire career path.
The beginning includes some stunt footage from some of Dave’s and/or 87North’s movies like Atomic Blonde, Hobbs and Shaw and Nobody, as well as some Universal movies like The Rundown, Jurassic World Dominion and Fast Five. Did you script any of these, or was it always TBD depending on clearances?
It was TBD, and that was actually a late edition sequence to the movie. I like it, but I also really loved when we just dropped straight in on the oner. There was always a version of that oner in the script. The great Peter O’Toole movie, The Stunt Man, was one of my influences on this film, and it starts with an incredible oner around a movie set that’s based at the Hotel del Coronado down in San Diego. Halfway through it, they go up on a cherry picker crane, but the camera gets on it with them. The crane then lifts them up as they keep talking. So that’s exactly what happens in our film, so I absolutely loved that. I also think it’s testimony to Ryan and Emily, but also Dave’s direction that you stay in that scene. The best kind of oner is the oner that doesn’t announce itself. It’s the oner where you don’t even realize that’s what you’re watching.
It also reminded me of Ryan’s oner at the beginning of The Place Beyond the Pines. He’s again called to “set” from his trailer, only it’s a traveling carnival.
100 percent. And in a movie that deals with Hollywood, the most classic opening oner of all is The Player. A double bill of The Player and The Stunt Man is a really fucking great night.
I’m only bringing this up because you’re drinking a cup of coffee right now, but all Colt wants is a cup of coffee at the start of the film, and he’s repeatedly denied it. Was there a deleted scene where he actually got a cup in the end?
There’s a double beverage issue that occurs in the movie. The spicy marg and the coffee are both beverage-based MacGuffins, and at some point, one of those beverage MacGuffins has to be the victor. And the love story should always trump everything else in this film, so spicy margs beat cups of coffees as the symbolic victory of Ryan’s character.
Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
David James/Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
I can’t let you go without forcing Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation into the conversation, and while I believe Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) was invented after your tenure on the film, I’m still in grief over her recent death in Dead Reckoning.
There was a version of her, but she wasn’t the Ilsa that’s in the final version. By the way, do we think she is the death that is to be reckoned with? I didn’t think so the first time I watched the movie, but then I was like, “Maybe …” Ilsa is, for me, the greatest back-half edition to the Mission movies.
100 percent. She’s actually my favorite character in the franchise.
She’s untouchable. What’s been so good about watching the Dune movies is seeing Rebecca really start to get the recognition that she deserves. In a weird way, she didn’t off of Rogue, but listen, it’s the brave move in DeadReckoning. You’re like, “Fuck, I’m going to miss her.” Weirdly, killing Benji [Simon Pegg] was actually something I debated at the beginning of RogueNation. Simon Pegg, if you’re reading, I apologize, but you are the easiest person to fridge in a weird way, because you have one of the longest relationships with Ethan. But I don’t think there’s a political repercussion for fridging him. It’s just an emotional one, which is what you want.
Franchise movies take a village, but given that you have story credit, how much ownership do you feel over Rogue?
I don’t feel any ownership over Rogue. In general — maybe beyond the director or lead, but actually across the board — I do think it’s slightly undignified when people land grab for ownership of sections of movies. And that’s one of the things that The Fall Guy is about. As you say, it does take a village, and everybody is in the pot. So that’s one of the great things about this movie’s much-wanted celebration of stunt work. Part of the community is getting recognition when they normally don’t. But there aren’t many moments of affirmation from doing any of our jobs either. Most scripts never get made. Movies never are hits if they happen at all. So you have to keep some pieces that remind you of why you do your job.
We’re in my office now, and there’s a wall of stuff behind me. So I’ll keep a piece of concept art from one of the sequences that meant a lot to me. There’s a few for Iron Man 3, but the one that you can see is when they park their suits next to all the bikes outside Neptune’s Net on the Pacific Coast Highway. That whole scene is there because I had just moved to Los Angeles, and for some bizarre reason, I took my 1-year-old child to a biker bar.
As one does …
As one does! So it has a really personal connection. The other piece of concept art that I’m pointing at is the underwater sequence from Rogue, and it’s one of my favorite action sequences where I’ve been a part of its creative genesis. I know where the napkin is from when I first had the idea. So that isn’t to land grab that, because that [final] sequence isn’t what I wrote. But that movie is the pure Cruise-McQuarrie mind meld, and I was just happy to be along for my bit of the ride.
But remembering the joy of everyone’s pieces in a film is vital. It’s what you have to do. If you talk to a set decorator who’s eight down the ladder, there’s one scene that they are so proud of because their lamp got foregrounded by the DP who really liked its practical glow. So that set dec person should be proud of that, and they should tell all of their friends how much they love that lamp.
*** The Fall Guy is now playing in movie theaters.
The Fall Guy is kicking off summer movie season with a No. 1 debut at the box office this weekend, but it’s coming in below initial tracking. After earning $10.4 million on Friday, the feature is now projected to open to $28 million for the weekend, down from earlier tracking that had it in the $30-$35 million range.
The film earned an A- CinemaScore from audiences, so it’s possible word of mouth could help the movie make up ground in the coming weeks. The Fall Guy is said to have a net budget of $130 million when accounting for incentives for shooting in Australia. Overseas, it is projected to take in another$25.8 million over the weekend, which would bring its global haul to $65.4 million. (It already opened in some markets last week.)
David Leitch, the stuntman who over the past decade has become an in-demand director, is behind the project. Ryan Gosling leads the cast as a stuntman who must track down the star of a movie that has gone missing. Emily Blunt plays the director of the feature, and she also happens to be the ex of Gosling’s character, with the action-heavy movie also featuring romance as well. Aaron Taylor-Johnson appears as the missing movie star, with the cast also including Winston Duke, Hannah Waddingham and Stephanie Hsu. After premiering at South by Southwest in March, the film has an 83 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Universal has marketed the feature as a love letter to Hollywood and the stunt community, staging a stunt-heavy premiere, fight-centric TV appearances and a theme park show. The feature, based on the 1980s TV show, comes at the height of Gosling’s popularity, following his Oscar-nominated performance as Ken in last summer’s Barbie, and breakout moments at the Oscars and on Saturday Night Live. Leitch and his 87North banner, which he runs with wife and producing partner Kelly McCormick, is known for its influential stunt work on their films, such as Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, The Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw and Bullet Train.
Amazon MGM Studios’ Challengers is holding in strong in its second weekend, falling just 42 percent for a projected second-place finish of $8.7 million for a cume of $30.5 million. Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist star in the sexy tennis drama.
The weekend’s other new offering is the $8 million budgeted horror feature Tarot from Sony’s Screen Gems. It hails from directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, and centers on a group of seven friends who accidentally unleash an evil entity trapped in a deck of cursed Tarot cards. Audiences gave it a low C- CinemaScore, while critics bestowed it an 8 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The studio embarked on an all-digital marketing campaign for Tarot (so no TV, no billboards), and it’s expected to come in fourth with $6.3 million, behind a re-release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which is back in theaters for its 25th anniversary as well as the Star Wars-centric May the Fourth holiday. It’s expected to bring in $7.5 million.
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) had it all: a flourishing career as stunt double for action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnston) and a relationship with cameraperson Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). But after breaking his back during a stunt gone awry, he abandons both. That is, until mega-producer Gail Myer (Hannah Waddingham) tells him Jody is now a director, and wants Colt to come join the production of her new movie in Australia. Two problems: Jody didn’t *actually* ask for him, and Ryder — the star of the picture — has disappeared. “Critical” Analysis: Gosling and Blunt have finally buried their Barbenheimer hatchet by appearing in a movie together. The Fall Guy, directed by former stunt dude David Leitch, is an action-comedy in the truest sense of both words. The stunt sequences are suitably pants-dampening, and the jokes are unforced and effective, thanks in large part to the chemistry between our leads.
Though it’s a little dicey at the outset. The opening titles kick off with the extremely disagreeable “I Was Made For Loving You” by Kiss. And if that wasn’t a bad enough omen, it’s the signature tune of the film, with remixes popping up alongside songs like “Thunderstruck,” a karaoke version of “Against All Odds” (performed by Blunt), and other selections likely to appeal to people in Leitch’s age group.
*cough*
Butt-rock selections aside, Leitch deftly weaves Colt’s onscreen punishment with a surprisingly satisfying romantic arc. It’s easy to chalk it up to the snappy dialogue between Gosling and Blunt, but it’s more likely they’re just naturally charismatic people. Blunt was able to convincingly portray being in love with *John Krasinski*, for crying out loud. And Gosling’s greatest onscreen romance was clearly with Russell Crowe.
Speaking of bad ’80s decisions, calling Jody’s breakthrough movie Metalstorm has to be an in-joke for Reagan era nerds, right? Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (spoiler!)? Not to be confused with Megaforce? Fun fact: in my rabbit-holing for this review, I learned that Jared-Syn was played by Michael Preston, who was Pappagallo in The Road Warrior! Maybe five of you care, but I thought that was pretty rad.
This version of Metalstorm sounds distinctly dumber than the original (if you can believe that), but that’s part of The Fall Guy’s charm. This movie-inside-a-movie approach allows Leitch to wink at the camera in a slightly less meta way than he did in Deadpool 2. Or almost, such as when Colt ruminates on why there’s no Academy Award for stunt performers
It’s also a bit of an insulting premise that Gosling isn’t good looking enough to be a lead (and hence, is eclipsed by Tom Ryder). Then again, Taylor-Johnson is quite the hunk.
And it’s just as well that The Fall Guy doesn’t take anything too seriously, because the key romantic conflict — Colt’s failure to reach out to Jody after his accident — is hardly “cheating on her with her best friend” territory. The guy was going through an existential crisis, for pity’s sake. So let he who hasn’t ghosted someone after 18 months cast the first stone.
Also: 18 months? Didn’t Batman heal his own broken back in, like, six weeks?
The Fall Guy is a rarity these days: a mainstream popcorn flick that appeals to just about everyone. With some brains, a lot of heart, old school stunt work, and an authentic romance, it’s some real old-fashioned moviemaking, and a less maudlin look at the industry than Hal Needham’s Hooper.
As far as movies that acknowledge the importance of stuntmen (because no one thinks of this as a profession for stuntwomen, clearly), the only one of mainstream note—up until now—has been Death Proof (unfortunately for Drew Barrymore, The Stand In doesn’t qualify). The Quentin Tarantino-directed film that was part of 2007’s Grindhouse double feature (which commenced with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror), wherein Kurt Russell plays the part of Stuntman Mike (and there is actually some play for a stuntwoman in the form of Zoë Bell). Like David Leitch’s The Fall Guy, Death Proof delights in its cleverness and meta-ness, but in a way that isn’t, shall we say, quite as fun. Though Tarantino surely thought that “sweet revenge” ending was all the fun any audience could want. But screenwriter Drew Pearce seems to be aware that they want something more than “Tarantino cleverness”—they want some fucking Ryan Gosling “hey girl”-style romance peppered in. With a dash of Tom Cruise roasting thrown into the mix, too. And that’s exactly what they get.
Starting from the beginning, Gosling as Colt Seavers delivers on both ingredients, with one of the first scenes consisting of Colt being told that Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, making better movies than his wife at the moment), “the biggest action star on the planet,” wants to speak with him. The name alone is already a dead giveaway that this is a major troll on Cruise, who has often boasted about doing his own stunts. This includes declaring one of the bigger stunts in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (namely, driving a motorcycle off a roughly four-thousand-foot high structure) to be “far and away the most dangerous thing I’ve ever attempted.”
Cruise’s long-running insistence that he does all his own stunts was parodied as far back as the 2000 MTV Movie Awards, during which a segment centered on Cruise’s supposedly nonexistent stunt double was featured, with Ben Stiller playing “Tom Crooze,” the stuntman in question. Presented as a behind-the-scenes documentary, even John Woo appears in it to say, “Tom Cruise does most of his own stunts. So he doesn’t really need a stunt double. But we make good use of the other Tom Cruise.” Meanwhile, The Fall Guy makes good use of both Tom Cruise (jokes) and the actor that’s clearly based on him and his ego: Tom Ryder. What’s more, seeing as how Pearce is credited as coming up with the story for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (the fifth installment in the film series), the amount of Tom Cruise-related wisecracks feels particularly pointed. Almost like Pearce is putting him in his place for having such arrogance. To that point, we see what happens to Colt as a result of his own so-called hubris (that is, in Tom Ryder’s estimation, who never, never wants to be overshadowed—least of all by his stunt double).
Although Gosling has previously starred in movies heavy with action (including Drive), this is his first proper “Hollywood action movie” (even if action-comedy). One that, incidentally, pokes fun at the Hollywood action movie (complete with an over-bloated third act). And yes, it’s surprising that it took Gosling this long to become an action hero (in lieu of his usual anti-hero) considering this was the boy compelled to bring steak knives to school and throw them at classmates thanks to inspiration from First Blood. The sense of homage in general to action movies past is a constant presence in The Fall Guy as well, whether including scenes of famous stunts from classic movies, mentioning that stunt work doesn’t qualify for having an Oscar category despite being the backbone of most major films or simply quoting action movies in general. This last form of reverence for the stuntman being an ongoing bit between Colt and his friend/stunt coordinator, Dan Tucker (Winston Duke).
Indeed, the first thing Dan quotes to Colt is Rambo—specifically, “It’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” This is meant to serve as motivation for conquering his fear of getting back in the proverbial saddle for “stunting.” For, by this point in the movie, the audience has been flashed with the title card “18 Months Later.” As in: eighteen months after Colt embodied the literal meaning of being a fall guy by plummeting from a twelve-story building and botching the stunt by landing right on his back. Moments after the fall, viewers see him being rushed to the hospital on a gurney as he gives the crew his customary “stuntman’s thumbs up” to indicate he’s fine.
But, of course, he’s not fine at all. No longer a stuntman, but an emotionally stunted man who has lost all sense of identity in the wake of realizing, in a very humiliating way, that he’s not invincible at all. The shame of the incident prompts him to cut off all communication with everyone he knew from that part of his life, even Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt, coming for Emma Stone in terms of onscreen chemistry with Gosling). The camera operator with directorial ambitions who became as sweet on Colt as he is on her over the course of working on many film productions together.
Having descended into the depths of “normalcy” after hanging up his kneepads, Colt has become a valet at a restaurant called El Cacatúa del Capitán (and yes, later a cockatoo will figure into the plot, along with an attack dog named Jean-Claude who only responds to commands given to him in French). It is Tom Ryder’s go-to producer, Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), that manages to track Colt down and call his new phone number to lure him to the set of a movie Ryder is currently working on called Metalstorm (something that looks a lot like a sendup of Dune, and even Edge of Tomorrow…an action-alien movie that Emily Blunt co-starred in with, you guessed it, Tom Cruise).
The project is already (down) underway in, where else, Sydney (a place that must be offering a lot of tax breaks lately if we’re to go by the recent rash of films shot there, such as The Invisible Man, Thor: Love and Thunder and Anyone But You). Although Colt is initially quick to rebuff Gail’s request to come and assist her with keeping Tom in line, he can’t help but respond positively to the dangled carrot (or “sexy bacon,” in this case) of her insistence that Jody, who has been hired as the director, expressly asked for him to be the stuntman.
Seeing an opportunity to right the wrong he did by ghosting her, Colt hops on the next plane, greeted promptly by facial scans from the set’s resident “effects person,” Venti Kushner (Zara Michales). When Colt asks why there’s suddenly all these bells and whistles, Venti informs him that they’re taking the scans so they can seamlessly computer-generate Tom’s face onto Colt’s face for any stunt scenes. Colt replies, “Like a deepfake situation? If you get a chance, turn me into Tom Cruise.” Oh my, Leitch and Pearce are really overestimating Cruise’s sense of humor about this sort of thing. An actor whose ego has steadily ballooned since he started out in the 80s, the decade when the TV series, The Fall Guy, originally aired. Because, yes, of course, it’s a movie based on a TV show (as LL Cool J once meta-ly complained at the beginning of Charlie’s Angels upon seeing the opening credits for T. J. Hooker: The Movie, “Another movie from an old TV show”).
This is something that Leitch and Pearce give a nod to via a post-credits scene focused on two cops played by Lee Majors and Heather Thomas (a.k.a. the stars of The Fall Guy). In the series, Lee Majors’ Colt is also a bounty hunter on the side (which is where that element comes into play for the movie) and Thomas’ Jody is a fellow stuntwoman whose last name is the more anglicized Banks instead of Moreno (and no, there is nothing about Blunt that makes her look like a Moreno).
As for being “upgraded” to director in the movie version, Jody is also given the chance to shine as a singer, with a lengthy karaoke scene providing her with the occasion to belt out Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” (granted, Mariah Carey delivers a possibly superior cover on Rainbow). Blunt kept right on singing for her cameo in Gosling’s monologue on SNL, during which the two duetted a parody version of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” (a song that features prominently in the movie). In their version of the song, they explore letting go of the characters that made them part of two of the biggest blockbusters of Summer 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer (so yes, Barbenheimer did manage to reanimate in 2024 by way of Blunt and Gosling working together).
In something of a missed opportunity, SNL didn’t opt to include a sketch of Gosling as a stuntman. But that’s fine, one supposes, for Gosling is no stranger to playing a serious stunt performer instead, having also done so in Drive and The Place Beyond the Pines (the set where he and Eva Mendes would translate their onscreen romance into an offscreen one). What’s more, it probably would have been too much for Gosling to play Tom Cruise in one of the sketches (for whatever reason, choosing to play Beavis was more important). Because even in the promo interviews for The Fall Guy, Gosling and Blunt still find time to rib Cruise. Case in point, when Gosling admits to IMDb, “I have a fear of heights,” Blunt replies, “Who doesn’t? Who doesn’t have a fear of heights?” “Tom Cruise,” Gosling says without missing a beat. But, for the most part, the duo keeps the focus of their interviews on having a deep respect and appreciation for what stunt people do. “It’s a love letter to the stunt community,” Gosling reiterates in an interview for MTV. Blunt adds, “They risk their souls, their bodies, their lives for us to make us look cool.” Gosling then concludes, “They risk more than anyone… You can’t separate the history of film [from] the history of stunts.”
History that continues to be made with The Fall Guy, which just secured an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for showcasing the most cannon rolls (eight and a half) ever performed in a film (executed by stunt driver Logan Holladay). It also happens to be the kind of laugh-a-minute film not seen since The Lost City(a movie that Argylleattempted to heavily emulate with less success). And that’s hard for someone like Tarantino, the only other person with as much well-documented “love” for stuntmen, to compete with, even when he also paid homage to the stunt community in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood via Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). A character who, in addition to Stuntman Mike, doesn’t exactly make for the best representation of the “average” stuntman.
Funnily enough, Leitch would also enlist Pitt for the lead in Bullet Train, a far less intelligent (read: not intelligent at all) action movie than what the director has on offer here. Thus, whatever “bad mojo” he was suffering from in 2022 (*cough cough* a bad script), he seems to have recovered from it as nicely as Colt Seavers after his massive, back-breaking fall…with more than just a little help from Pearce and a leading man as charismatic as Gosling and his “tousled just so” coif.
The Fall Guy, which tells the story of Ryan Gosling‘s down-and-out stuntman, fully embraced the action at its Los Angeles premiere on Tuesday, with stuntmen fighting, falling and riding motorcycles all over the red carpet.
Held at the Dolby Theatre, the premiere transformed Hollywood Boulevard into its own movie set, as two stuntmen did wheelies down the press line on their motorbikes, followed by another jumping off a multi-story platform onto the carpet entrance. Then, Gosling stood between two of his stunt doubles from the film — all dressed in matching suits — as the performers were ripped through the step-and-repeat. Later, three stuntmen broke though glass to enter the carpet and fight each other in front of the crowd; and right before the screening, another jumped from the balcony of the Dolby down onto the stage to join the cast.
Gosling — who on top of all of that, made an appearance alongside Mikey Day as Beavis and Butt-Head, from the Saturday Night Live sketch they appeared in earlier this month, before changing back into his suit — told the audience, “Obviously this a love letter to the stunt community, they are the hardest-working people in show business. They risk more than anyone. This movie is just a giant campaign to get stunts an Oscar.” (The Academy currently doesn’t recognize a stunt category at the Oscars).
“I don’t know what to say, how do you say thank you to someone that got set on fire eight times for you, jumped from a helicopter, rolled a car eight times for you — this is just such an example of what they do for us, what they contribute to cinema, what they risk for all of us,” the star continued. “It’s really been an honor to be a part of something that tells your story in some small way.”
The film follows Gosling’s Colt Seavers, who has retired from the business but returns to find the missing star of his ex-girlfriend’s (played by Emily Blunt) blockbuster film. On the carpet, Blunt weighed in on why she thinks stuntpeople have been underappreciated for so long.
“I think we’re all really baffled by it because they are the unsung heroes of our industry, I don’t know why they live in the shadows; maybe their incredible humility and the fact that they want to maintain the mystique for audiences, to give audiences that sort of sense of wonder that it’s the actor doing it,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I just feel that we’re past that point, there is no mystique to making movies now. We see the behind-the-scenes of prosthetics and all of that, so why don’t we see the behind the scenes of how a stunt is designed by these incredible performers?”
Gosling has five stunt doubles in the film, but does some of the work himself, including a 12-story fall. Director David Leitch (a former stuntman himself) and producer Kelly McCormick reflected on that the decision for him to do that stunt, as McCormick said it “was really a big gauntlet for him in his experience of Colt Seavers. And the day that he did it, I may have been bawling my eyes out because I was watching from below and he was way up high. I trust the system and I trust the team, but there was something so emotional and beautiful about him trusting them too and going out there and going for it, as scared as he is of heights.”
“It was really thrilling and sort of like the moment we knew he was really embracing the character full-on,” Leitch added. “He was a great partner all the way through the movie and that was sort of one physical demonstration of it. He was ready to do any of the stunts that we’d asked him to do.”
He was joined at The Grove by director David Leitch and co-stars Emily Blunt, Winston Duke, Hannah Waddingham and Stephanie Hsu, as they gave the crowd an early sneak peek of the film. The project stars Gosling as a stuntman who left the business and is drawn back in when the lead of a movie (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) that is directed by his ex (Blunt) goes missing.
“I was on a kid’s action TV show called Young Hercules, and I’ve basically had a stunt double my whole life,” Gosling said of his longtime relationship with stuntmen. “There’s this sort of accepted dynamic where they come on set, they do all the cool stuff, they risk everything, and then they disappear into the shadows and we all pretend as if they were never there. Everyone else on set gets credit, but there’s kind of unspoken understanding that they won’t,” before jokingly declaring, “That ends today!”
He continued, “It took like eight stunt performers to make one Fall Guy, and there were times when I was like, ‘Should we be making a movie or robbing a bank? Because this is kind of the greatest bank-robbing team’… it was like the Avengers or something, and a lot of them probably were the Avengers, if you look at their CVs. I’ve benefitted from their work and their help since I started, so to be a part of telling their story and in some small way trying to reflect how vital they are and how important what they do is.”
One of the film’s specific stuntmen, Logan Holladay, was specifically recognized at the screening, as he was presented with a Guinness World Record title for doing the most cannon rolls in a car — reaching eight and a half rolls during one scene while performing as Gosling’s stunt driver. Gosling noted that in the film, “He’s buckling me into a car for a stunt he’s about to do. And then he goes on to do eight and a half cannon rolls, which is a world record, and then he pulls me out of the car and pats me on the back for the stunt that he just did. In any other movie, you wouldn’t know that, but in this movie you do.”
Leitch, a former stunt performer himself, also noted how personal the movie is for him, saying he wanted it to be “not just a celebration of action films but a celebration of the stunts and stunt people behind the scenes, the unsung heroes who really do risk their lives to bring you some of the most memorable sequences in film, and the hard work they put in and the joy they have doing it.”
Waddingham joked on stage, “I feel like in a different life, if I actually had balls to do it, I would have quite liked to have been a stuntwoman. I actually said this to David and [producer] Kelly [McCormick], and then they realized that I could do a bit of it but it was quite limited, and so the stunt community probably don’t have to worry about me joining them.”
