Before Ryan Gosling became The Fall Guy, he was one of The Nice Guys, starring in Shane Black's comedy as a private detective alongside Russell Crowe. Years on from the well-received film's release, viewers have wondered how it has yet to receive a sequel, but Gosling has an idea.
The reason, according to the actor, is birds — angry ones at that. More specifically, those starring in 2016's The Angry Birds Movie, a big-screen adaptation of the mobile video game series directed by Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly.
Both The Angry Birds Movie and The Nice Guys opened the same weekend in the United States and Canada. The former film grossed $39 million at the box office, while the latter grossed $11.3 million.
"So much of a sequel, I think, is decided by the opening weekend of a movie, and we opened up against Angry Birds," Gosling told Comic Book in a recent interview. "So Angry Birds just, just destroyed us. Angry Birds got a sequel."
In a 9/10 review of The Nice Guys, Exclaim! deemed Black's film "one of the funniest but also most deeply satisfying movies of the year."
Exclaim!'s 4/10 review of The Angry Birds Movie, however, called the film "so forgettable and unfunny it's bound to go the way of the dodo" — a fate unsurprising for a film "based on a video game people play while using the toilet."
So long as calls for a sequel are heard, Gosling will never forget. "Just Ken" no longer, the Canadian will appear as The Fall Guy in theatres on May 3.
