Why The Fall Guy Just Flopped
4. Unremarkable Marketing
Poor marketing has sunk the commercial prospects of many good movies, and while The Fall Guy's trailers weren't awful, they were rather generic and listless.
By focusing on the broadest possible action-comedy beats but being suspiciously vague about the plot - which is far more of a murder-mystery than implied - the marketing didn't really cement this movie as a sure-fire must-see on the big screen.
It didn't help that Universal also released the first trailer a whole six months prior to release, because as Argylle proved a few months ago, nothing saps an audience's desire to see a movie quite like being subjected to the same trailer over and over and over again for months.
By the time audiences had been shown that Bon Jovi-scored trailer for The Fall Guy a couple-dozen times, they'd grown a bit tired of the whole idea.
It didn't help that the film ended up being delayed from March to May shortly after the first trailer dropped, and so in retrospect, Universal probably would've been smart to hold back their marketing push back until the start of this year.