For all of his influence on an entire genre of cinema, Shane Black hasn’t half had a run of rotten luck at the box office, with The Nice Guys not even the first one of his acclaimed efforts to bomb at the box office.
Making his name for reinventing the face of action cinema as the writer behind Lethal Weapon, virtually everything he’s touched ever since with the exception of Iron Man 3 has gone down in a ball of commercial flames, regardless of how good it turned out to be. Sure, The Predator probably deserved its fate, but stone-cold cult classics The Long Kiss Goodnight and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang most definitely did not.
Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe’s madcap odd couple adventure through the seedy underbelly of 1977 Los Angeles was one of the best-reviewed original films of 2016, racking up a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 91 percent. And yet, nobody seemed all that bothered to catch it on the big screen, with the $50 million crime caper notching just $63 million in ticket sales to post a loss for studio Warner Bros.
That remains one of the most egregious oversights of the modern age, because the concept was ripe for further installments, and almost everyone who caught The Nice Guys was nothing less than suitably impressed with what they saw. Thankfully, the age of streaming has seen it continue to grow its ever-expanding fandom, with FlixPatrol revealing it to be one of the most-watched titles on ad-supported platform Freevee, even though it would have been preferable for viewers to fall in love with it seven years ago.
