Box office: The Fall Guy, uh, falls behind expectations as summer gets off to a slow start

Also: The Phantom Menace is one of the Top 2 films at the box office for the first time in 25 years, Tarot is the year's latest struggling horror movie, and Unsung Hero has a steep second-week drop.

He leaps! He falls! He’s suspended in mid-air as long as this is the only frame we’re looking at! Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy.

There once was a time when the summer movie season began in mid- to late May, circa the American Memorial Day. That all changed in 1999, when The Mummy opened on May 7 and grossed $43.4 million in its first three days.

At the time, that was the ninth-biggest opening weekend of all time, and far, far more than any film had made at that point on the calendar.¹ But the success of that film established a new tradition: from then on, the summer movie season would begin on the first full weekend in May.

For a while, it wasn’t clear what kind of film would dominate this weekend. The R-rated historical revenge epic Gladiator took the weekend in 2000, and then the Mummy franchise reclaimed it with a sequel, The Mummy Returns, in 2001.

But then Spider-Man came along in 2002 and became the first movie ever to gross $100 million in a single weekend. Things stayed in flux for the next few years…

• X2: X-Men United took the weekend in 2003;

• Van Helsing, an action-horror hybrid directed by The Mummy’s Stephen Sommers and starring X-Men’s Hugh Jackman, took the weekend in 2004;

• Kingdom of Heaven, another R-rated historical epic directed by Ridley Scott (the director of Gladiator), took the weekend in 2005;

• and Mission: Impossible III, the third installment of a franchise that had opened its first two movies on Memorial Day, took the weekend in 2006.

…but by the time Spider-Man 3 came out in 2007, a new pattern had set in: the first weekend in May—and thus the first weekend of the summer movie season—would be led by a Marvel movie. And with the arrival of Iron Man in 2008, the weekend would almost always be led by a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, specifically.²

Not this year, though. Thanks in part to last year’s Hollywood strikes, there were no new Marvel movies ready to go this weekend, and so the film that kicked off this year’s summer was The Fall Guy, an action comedy starring two of the Oscar-nominated supporting actors from last year’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon.

Going into the weekend, experts were predicting that the film would open somewhere in the $30 million to $40 million range. That, in and of itself, would have been one of the softer summer openings of the past 25 years—but there was hope that Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt could attract a crowd ready for some fun.

And… instead, the film basically stumbled right out of the gate.