Legendary producer Jerry Bruckheimer has insisted unexpected box office failures are nothing new.

This month, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s action comedy The Fall Guy underperformed at the box office, while Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has so far been a commercial failure, reportedly halting development on future Mad Max instalments.

Amid the speculation that the theatrical experience is dying, Bruckheimer insisted that the box office is unpredictable and there’s an unexpected hit right around the corner.

“That’s happened since the beginning of time. There are movies that we expect to do business that the audience doesn’t care to see. It happens, it could have happened 10 years ago,” he told Cover Media. “It’s about making something that the audience wants to see and that’s what it’s all about. And we don’t know what that is, we take our best shot and try to do it and sometimes we hit it and sometimes we don’t.”

The 80-year-old, who has worked in movies since the ’70s, said he didn’t expect his film Top Gun: Maverick to be as successful as it was in 2022.

“You just don’t know what they want to go see. If they want to go see something, they line up for it, they can’t wait,” he continued. “For whatever reason, those two movies you mentioned, they didn’t want (to do that)… not that they’re bad movies, I’m sure they’re not – I haven’t seen them, I’m sure they’re very good – but it didn’t engage them, the concept or whatever. That’s unfortunate but there’ll be a movie that’ll sneak out this summer that nobody ever thought would be a success.”

He recalled when Beverly Hills Cop opened at the same time as City Heat, starring Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, in 1984 and everybody expected the latter to be the hit.

“It was going to be the huge success, we were going to be nothing. It turned out we were the highest-grossing R-rated movie until The Hangover,” he recalled. “That movie did OK but we beat everybody, so you just can’t predict.”

The Pirates of the Caribbean and Bad Boys producer acknowledged that “you have to” care about box office figures, even though they’re not a true reflection on the quality of a feature.

“That’s always been the way, that’s never changed. A lot of really beautifully made movies with enormous quality didn’t attract a big audience,” he stated, adding that they sometimes become “icons of films many years later”.

Bruckheimer is currently promoting Young Woman and the Sea, starring Daisy Ridley as Gertrude ‘Trudy’ Ederle, the first woman to cross the English Channel in 1926.

The film was released in select U.K. cinemas on Friday 31 May.

© Cover Media