The Fall Guy Failure Is Not The Reboot To Get Sad About
By now, you’ve no doubt heard about The Fall Guy and its failure to live up to everyone’s expectations. The movie is apparently performing so badly at the box office that it’s already available to watch at home despite being released less than a month ago. The general consensus seems to be that The Fall Guy bombing is some tragic blow to the continued viability of the theater industry.
Meanwhile, I’m over here wondering why anyone cares.
Just Another ’80s Reboot
Look, I’m sure the movie is great—81 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, beautiful stars like Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt—but at the end of the day, it’s still a reboot of an ’80s TV show. If it succeeded, Tinseltown would have rushed a dozen similar TV adaptations into production. Am I the only one who remembers the ’90s?
The Fall Guy’s failure might have single-handedly saved us from a repeat of the string of horrible TV show films we were subjected to during the Clinton administration. Sure, the ’90s started off promising with The Addams Family (1991) and The Fugitive (1993)—two successful movies based on old television shows. But then the decade quickly went downhill.
’90s Reboots Were No Better
Anyone remember The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) or Car 54, Where Are You? (1994)? How about My Favorite Martian (1999)? Anyone old enough to have suffered through those films knows how bad things could have gotten if The Fall Guy hadn’t been a failure.
Failure Isn’t Necessarily A Bad Thing
And even if The Fall Guy succeeded and didn’t spawn a new wave of big-screen television adaptations, isn’t its failure still a good thing? Cinephiles have been complaining for years about Hollywood putting out nothing but sequels, reboots, and remakes. What does everyone think The Fall Guy is?
It feels like a bunch of pop culture websites are suddenly weeping over the kind of movie they would usually be hating on. I understand that the discourse surrounding The Fall Guy‘s box office failure is more about the future of movie theaters as a whole and the role streaming plays in their slow but inevitable decline. However, I still think the opposite would have been worse.
We Don’t Need Another Wild Wild West
The people mourning what could have been had The Fall Guy succeeded clearly need to be sat down and made to watch Mr. Magoo (1997) with their eyes held open A Clockwork Orange-style. Do you want Wild Wild West (1999)? Because movies like The Fall Guy doing Blockbuster numbers are how you get Wild Wild West.
Reboot Fatigue Is Real
Do you think I’m exaggerating? Look at the number of Marvel movies before X-Men (2000) vs. how many came out after. All it takes is one successful movie to start a Hollywood trend, especially now with studios scrambling to find the next big genre before superhero fatigue reaches its peak.
Enough Is Enough
Trust me when I say that somebody in Hollywood was watching The Fall Guy like a hawk, waiting for it to earn enough to justify a Magnum P.I. reboot. The Fall Guy being a failure may end up being the best thing to ever happen to movies.
OK, that’s an exaggeration, but it’s certainly not the tragedy some people are making it out to be.
