The Fall Guy isn’t trying to make history or save the world. It’s a big-budget movie, based on an old TV show, about a stuntman named Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) who investigates the disappearance of the actor (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) he’s supposed to be doubling for on the set of a movie directed by his ex-girlfriend Jody (Emily Blunt). To help his ex, and maybe win her back, Colt goes through a heightened gauntlet of outlandish off-set stunt sequences, infused with sparkling movie-star charisma. If this sounds, right down to the recycled title, a bit like The Nice Guys meets one of the other action movies directed by David Leitch (most recently of Bullet Train) with the added sheen of Gosling’s post-Barbie glow, well, that’s more or less what it is – albeit a blue-sky best-case-scenario version. By the quirks of release-date traditions, however, this also happens to be a historical marker, because The Fall Guy is kicking off the summer-movie season of 2024, which happens to be the first summer-movie season in nearly two decades without a superhero film.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. At some point, Disney planned to open the summer movie season– which, unlike summer itself, inched earlier on the calendar throughout the ’90s before settling on the first weekend in May around the turn of this century– with Captain America: Brave New World, starring Anthony Mackie as the new Cap. (The proof is now appearing in a McDonald’s near you: Because of the long lead time needed to manufacture Happy Meal toys, adorable little plush previews of next February’s MCU sequel are out right now.) But when the strike reshuffled every studio’s release plans, The Fall Guy bravely claimed the first weekend in May. The last time a non-MCU title took this spot was a decade ago, with 2014’s off-brand The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The last time a non-superhero title had it was all the way back in 2006, with the debut of Mission: Impossible III. (Back then, it was the third underperforming kickoff in a row, following Van Helsing and Kingdom of Heaven.)
Technically, there was a break in both 2020, when COVID-19 closed most movie theaters for most of the summer, and in 2021, where a gradual re-opening meant that big summer movies trickled out slower, with Black Widow abdicating its May slot for a safer July. If you want to get really fussy, those last two Avengers movies got a week-early jump on their initially announced releases by coming out at the tail-end of April. But those were all exceptions that proved the rule: Summer doesn’t really start until a Marvel superhero shows up. It’s such a tradition that Free Comic Book Day, an annual promotion for the oft-woeful actual-comics industry, has planted itself on the first Saturday in May, in part to feed off excitement over whatever comics-based blockbuster was providing that summer’s first fireworks.
All of which makes plugging The Fall Guy into the superhero slot the rare display of marketing savvy that dovetails non-menacingly with the movie’s style and theme. Director David Leitch is a former stuntman himself, who graduated to second-unit directing, then made John Wick with his partner Chad Stahelski before splitting off to become a franchise go-to for the likes of Deadpool 2 and Hobbs & Shaw. His recent films have copious digital effects, as does The Fall Guy, but the latter feels less like a work of expensive animation and face-mapping – techniques that are both parodied and treated as an inevitable part of the moviemaking process. Though it’s obviously not a documentary, The Fall Guy takes great pleasure in showcasing that process; while Leitch’s Atomic Blonde used a “oner” to capture a major Charlize Theron brawl in what appeared to be a single shot (another technique enthused over by Blunt’s first-time director character), here Leitch uses long takes primarily on his film-set sequences, pulling together banter, tech-speak, and good old-fashioned professionalism for fast-paced walk-and-talk-and-kabooms, like some action-movie Sorkin. The expected in-jokes and goofy references never feel especially insular or smug; The Fall Guy is made with real love and high spirits.
