The Fall Guy, the film which once hoped to kick off the summer box office, is reportedly heading to PVOD in the US this week.
In a move sure to keep American theatre owners in good spirits, The Fall Guy seems set to make its home video debut stateside on Tuesday after a luxurious 17-day cinema exclusivity window.
The Ryan Gosling/Emily Blunt action-comedy hasn’t proved to be the original blockbuster hit everyone was hoping for. Debuting to $27.7m in its US opening weekend, the film fell short of both its $30m-$35m predicted total and Universal’s all-important $50m blockbuster target.
Why is that important? Since ye olde Covid times, Universal have struck a pretty smart deal with US theatres allowing them to put any film which doesn’t make $50m in its domestic opening weekend onto Premium Video On Demand streaming after 17 days.
But Universal aren’t the only studio on this trend. The Fall Guy follows in the footsteps of sexy tennis drama Challengers, which arrived on rental PVOD on Friday. Challengers is distributed by Amazon MGM in the US.
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This, unsurprisingly, works out rather well for film studios. According to IndieWire, revenue share for Universal from a PVOD release is close to 80 per cent, compared to about 50 per cent in cinemas.
For cinema owners, though? We can’t imagine they’re best pleased. We’d humbly suggest that it might be difficult to persuade people to come back to the big screen if almost every film a studio produces will become available online in three weeks – but what do we know?
More on this as we get it.
