Last year the movie world was excited for Barbenheimer and this year two of the big stars from Barbie and Oppenheimer, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, have come together in The Fall Guy cast. Coming off Barbie’s incredible success is likely good for The Fall Guy, as Gosling is a hot commodity right now. But it turns out that Gosling is a big part of the reason that we didn’t get The Fall Guy sooner, as the production had to wait for Barbie, which was ultimately a good thing for The Fall Guy.
The Fall Guy has been in development since 2010. Originally Dwayne Johnson was going to star in a movie directed by McG. Years later, the movie becomes a David Leitch production starring Ryan Gosling. With the film following Gosling’s Oscar-nominated turn in Barbie, The Fall Guy is certainly a bigger movie than it would have been otherwise. But nobody was thinking about that at the time.
Director David Leitch Says The Fall Guy Could Have Happened Before Barbie
Apparently Barbie and The Fall Guy were jockeying for position in Ryan Gosling’s schedule. There was a concerted effort to try and fit The Fall Guy in and get in done before Gosling went on to film Barbie. At Wondercon (via Popverse) David Leitch said he and his producing partner and wife Kelly McCormick, alongside Universal, really wanted to get their movie done first. He explained…
Kelly McCormick, my producer and my wife, we make these movies together… we were fighting so hard to get The Fall Guy off the ground before Barbie, and the studio was really trying to pressure Ryan ‘Can we squeeze all that in before Barbie?’ We were trying to move deadlines. And then finally we just couldn’t make production work where we can get it in done.
Scheduling for films is always tough. Major actors are in high demand, but can only work on one movie at a time, so movies often end up battling over stars. We often hear about actors having to drop out of films due to scheduling conflicts. That happens when a movie decides not to wait for a certain star to go into production. The Fall Guy waited for Ryan Gosling, which was clearly the right call.
The Fall Guy Producer Admits Not Everybody Was Happy The Film Had To Wait…At First
While Kelly McCormick may have worked hard to try and get The Fall Guy done earlier, she failed in that. At the time she admits she, and everybody else producing the film, was upset they had to wait, but now they couldn’t be happier. McCormick recently told Indiewire that attitudes changed drastically following Barbie’s massive success. She said…
It was worth the wait. It doesn’t feel like it was that much time in the end, but we did have to wait for Barbie. That’s a funny story. Everyone was pretty mad that we had to wait for Barbie, and now we’re really happy that we waited for Barbie.
The Fall Guy starring Ryan Gosling was always going to be a movie that some people would be interested, but The Fall Guy starring Ryan Gosling in a post “I’m Just Ken” world is something else. There are absolutely more people interested in seeing Ryan Gosling in a movie now than there were before Barbie’s release, so The Fall Guy will likely be a bigger hit at the box office than it otherwise would have been.