The Forgotten Failures Of Ryan Gosling

Is there anyone more beloved in Hollywood right now than Ryan Gosling? The 43-year-old Canadian actor has had a truly awe-inspiring career in the decades since he burst into the entertainment industry on Disney's "The Mickey Mouse Club" as a young artist. From his entrancingly broody turn in the tense thriller "Drive" to his implacably Kenergetic (and Oscar-nominated) performance in Greta Gerwig's "Barbie," it's hard to imagine any of his peers not harboring at least a little jealousy for his uniquely eclectic body of work. Indeed, Gosling has made home runs out of an enviable number of big swings in his career — but many of those swings also resulted in equally large misses.

While it's easy to get overpowered by his dreamy song-and-dance in "La La Land," Gosling's actual journey to artistic success was somehow far more volatile than that of his tap-dancing counterpart. For every "sublime" high, there remains some wince-inducing low lingering on his resume. As we enjoy Gosling taking a beating in the trailer for his upcoming film "The Fall Guy" – waiting with bated breath to see whether or not it will be another explosive success or leave his career equally bruised — we've taken a look at some of his critical and commercial failures throughout his tenure as Hollywood's favorite heartthrob.

From "The Gray Man" to "First Man": another idea that sounds excellent on paper is a reunion between Ryan Gosling and "La La Land" director Damien Chazelle. The difference in this case is that the latter film — a biopic about the legendary astronaut Neil Armstrong — actually garnered favorable reviews from the critical community and became a serious contender during the 2018-2019 awards season. So why is this film still one of Gosling's biggest failures? Because, for an Oscar-worthy reunion of a bankable Hollywood star and a director quickly on the rise, "First Man" surprisingly didn't take off at the box office.

There are plenty of reasons why "First Man" bombed, key among them that it was released against hits like "Venom" and "A Star Is Born." In hindsight, it arguably shouldn't have been too shocking that a Marvel film with an A-list leading man and a film starring a contemporary music icon with a devoted fan base would fare better financially than an artsy space-age drama. Although Universal's President of Domestic Distribution Jim Orr projected confidence over the film's underwhelming debut – claiming their target audience of adult males would hold its performance steady over several weeks — "First Man" ultimately made just $105 million worldwide against a lofty budget of nearly $80 million.

What if we told you there was a film out there that starred not just Ryan Gosling, but fellow Academy Award nominees Michael Fassbender, Rooney Mara, Natalie Portman, and Cate Blanchett? You might be a bit shocked — surely any one of our readers would have heard of a movie with so much star power that it arguably rivals "Oppenheimer." One more name, however, would probably make all this confusion go away rather quickly: Terrence Malick.

As a director and writer, Malick's work is not the least bit conventional. His films are rarely paced like one might expect, are almost unanimously experimental, and overall have little concern for placating the demands of commercial filmmaking. In other words, for those familiar with Malick's style, it isn't surprising that 2017's "Song to Song" was neither critically nor commercially successful. Like his other films, Malick's somber and exploratory tale of unfaithful artists trying to find meaning in their lives almost defies critical comparison, and was likely never expected to draw the same crowds as other star-studded dramas.

It's hard then to classify this as a true "failure," even though it did objectively fail to make a positive impression among a majority of critics or audiences, and made less than $2 million worldwide. Given the autonomy Malick had, one would imagine he succeeded in whatever goal he was attempting to accomplish with "Song to Song."

If you ask critics and audiences – the few who have actually seen 2014's "Lost River," that is — for their opinion on the film, they'll likely tell you there's nothing incredibly special about it. Except, of course, that it was the first and (for now) last film written and directed by Ryan Gosling.

Chances are, you've probably never heard of "Lost River," and might have been entirely unaware that Gosling once stepped behind the camera for an ambitiously surreal film starring a whole host of recognizable names (Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan, and Matt Smith to name a few). In spite of the cast and an audacious story (that starts with a single mother raising two children and ends with, we kid you not, Ben Mendelsohn executing one of the creepiest dance sequences ever put on tape) the film failed to break out of the festival circuit and made a total of just $615,500.

Still, there's an argument to be made that if "Lost River" were released today — when weird A24 films like "Beau is Afraid" are able to make their mark — Gosling's work might have found a larger audience, especially if you take his current level of fame into account.

Though they're best known for dancing through Los Angeles together in "La La Land," Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone had actually already collaborated twice before at that point. In 2011, the pair played love interests in the successful modern ensemble farce "Crazy, Stupid, Love," which also starred Steve Carell, drew mostly positive reviews, and grossed a very fair $145 million.

Shortly afterward, however, Stone and Gosling reunited under less auspicious circumstances for the mob thriller "Gangster Squad." Directed by Ruben Fleischer (best known at the time for directing "Zombieland"), "Gangster Squad" was dumped into theaters in January 2013 and made just over $105 million against a $60 million budget – a budget which seems to suggest that Warner Bros. expected Fleischer, Gosling, Stone, and the rest of the top-shelf talent on board to deliver a massive hit. To make matters worse, "Gangster Squad" also received largely negative reviews from critics, who generally felt that it used mind-numbing violence to distract from a flat and uninteresting script.

As beloved as "Barbie" was, there are probably more than a few cinephiles out there who feel it was only the second-best film about Ryan Gosling falling desperately in love with a doll. The 2007 dramedy "Lars and the Real Girl" (directed by Craig Gillespie, who later helmed "I, Tonya" and "Cruella") stars Gosling as the titular character, an awkward and socially isolated young man who develops a relationship with a life-like doll he orders from an adult online shop. In order to support him through his struggles with the underlying issues of his delusion, Lars' family and friends pretend the doll is real.

"Lars and the Real Girl" received largely positive reviews upon its release, with writer Nancy Oliver even netting an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay (she ultimately lost to Diablo Cody for "Juno"). But, as you might have guessed at this point, it's yet another great Gosling film that barely registered at the box office, grossing less than $11.3 million against a budget of $12 million. Suffice it to say, there won't be any "Lars and the Real Girl" sequels anytime soon — unless, of course, you count "Barbie."

"The United States of Leland" tells the story of a boy (Ryan Gosling) who is imprisoned in a juvenile detention facility after taking the life of another child. While inside, he ingratiates himself with a teacher (Don Cheadle), who in turn recognizes some human depth within the boy and bends certain rules in order to give him a more comfortable life. As such dramas go, many tragic and emotionally cathartic events ensue, and everyone in the audience leaves the theater in a more pensive, if not worse, mood than when they got there.

If its depressing storyline were any indication, 2003's "The United States of Leland" performed terribly both critically and commercially. More surprising is that, in spite of a fairly impressive cast of actors less than a decade away from their respective career peaks, reviews for the film consistently pointed out the performances among the film's key issues.

Finally, we come to "The Believer," a film which provided Ryan Gosling with one of his earliest and arguably most challenging starring roles, as well as his first critical-hit-commercial-failure combo. Unlike "The Nice Guys" and "Lars and the Real Girl," however, we have to warn you that this film is far more difficult to watch and far darker in terms of its subject matter.

"The Believer" follows the story of Danny (Gosling), a fictionalized version of the real-life neo-Nazi Dan Burros. In 1965, a New York Times exposé revealed that Burros was actually Jewish, despite having relentlessly and genuinely advocated for violence against Jewish people (in the real world, Burros died by suicide soon after the article was published, though the narrative of "The Believer" deviates from reality significantly). The film made $1.3 million against a budget of $1.5 million, failing to recoup its cost by a significant margin.