Ten years after Shane Black’s buddy cop comedy The Nice Guys hit theaters, there’s still no sequel. According to Ryan Gosling, it’s clear who is to blame.
“Angry Birds killed us,” he said in one interview earlier this year. “So much of a sequel is decided by the opening weekend of a movie and we opened up against Angry Birds and Angry Birds just destroyed us,” he said in another.
Yes, both The Nice Guys and The Angry Birds Movie came out on the same day, but does the evidence support Gosling’s claims? Even if his resentment of The Angry Birds Movie is mostly a joke, Polygon still asked a professional as a coping mechanism (we’d love to see a Nice Guys 2).
Both The Nice Guys and The Angry Birds Movie were released on May 20, 2016. The Angry Birds Movie pulled in over $38 million in its opening weekend while The Nice Guys made just over $11 million. But The Nice Guys was not in second place at the box office, it was fourth. In its third weekend, Captain America: Civil War made nearly $33 million, placing it in the number 2 slot that weekend. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, a comedy starring Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, and Zac Efron, occupied the number 3 slot with a haul of nearly $22 million.
And that movie may have more to do with The Nice Guys’ lack of a sequel.
According to Shawn Robbins, Director of Movie Analytics at Fandango and Founder of Box Office Theory, “When [The Angry Birds Movie and The Nice Guys] came out 10 years ago, there was actually a third movie that opened that weekend and it was the sequel to Neighbors, which was a huge hit just a few years before and probably shared a little bit more of an audience with The Nice Guys than The Angry Birds Movie, which was very family-driven.”
Robbins also said “It’s very rare” for a kids movie to affect the box office returns for an adult comedy like The Nice Guys. Only huge tentpole movies for kids, “like Inside Out 2 or Toy Story 5,” have the power to do that, which The Angry Birds Movie doesn’t exactly qualify as.
Robbins also says that, when it comes to studios deciding if a movie gets a sequel, the opening weekend, while important, is not all that’s considered. If a movie enjoys a longer box office run generated by word-of-mouth, it may recover from a disappointing opening. The Nice Guys ended up making $62 million at the box office by the end of its run. But with a reported budget of $50 million, Black’s film was likely a loss for distributor Warner Bros. Pictures.
The movie has become a bit of a cult hit in the decade since its release, so maybe the audience for a sequel is there after all, especially since Gosling and his co-star, Russell Crowe, still command a lot of star power.
“Never say never,” says Robbins. “I mean, look, we’re getting a Spaceballs sequel next year.”
So maybe, someday, we’ll get a sequel to The Nice Guys after all. In the meantime, it sounds like Ryan Gosling, instead of blaming The Angry Birds Movie, should be pointing the finger at Seth Rogen.
