“We got killed”: the 2016 animated movie Ryan Gosling will always hate with a passion
As well as being a bona fide megastar, Ryan Gosling has starred in his fair share of cult hits, and it’s only relatively recently that he’s found himself back in the mainstream spotlight.
His early career is littered with the types of small movies that drive Mubi subscribers wild, from Lars and the Real Girl to Half Nelson, and then there’s Drive, the gritty thriller that made a lot of people sit up and take notice of the hunk as a serious actor.
Possibly his biggest cult film (which might be an oxymoron) is 2016’s The Nice Guys, a stylish comedy buddy movie pairing Gosling’s Holland March, a private detective, with Russell Crowe’s Jackson Healy, a hired gun initially conscripted to take him down. The film features performances from Kim Basinger, Keith David, and a young Margaret Qualley, but it’s all about the chemistry between Gosling and Crowe, who are absolutely magnetic together and one of the many reasons why this film has developed such a rabid fanbase.
If you talk to any fan of The Nice Guys, the first thing they will talk to you about is a sequel, and in an era where everything is getting turned into a franchise, this diamond in the rough remains a one-and-done. It made $62.8million and currently sits on 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it prime for a second film, but if you ask Gosling why that’s not been the case, he says that one group of brightly-coloured critters is to blame.
In various interviews, the Oscar-nominated Ken doll blamed strong competition for The Nice Guys not doing better at the box office. Big movies released around the same time included Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and Captain America: Civil War, and if that wasn’t enough, there was also The Angry Birds Movie, which has become Gosling’s least-favourite film of all time.
“We got killed by Angry Birds,” he told Letterboxd, “[The Nice Guys] came out at the same time as Angry Birds, and Angry Birds just destroyed us. They’re just so angry”.
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he reiterated his hatred for the cartoon avians, declaring point-blank, “Don’t ask me about that. Then I gotta talk about Angry Birds, and then everyone is going to say, ‘Oh, he’s obsessed with Angry Birds. This guy is still going on about Angry Birds’”.
Loosely inspired by the video game series of the same name, The Angry Birds Movie was released on exactly the same day as The Nice Guys, boasting an all-star voice cast of Jason Sudeikis, Maya Rudolph, Sean Penn, Peter Dinklage, and many more. The film hit the family market and hit it hard, obliterating Gosling’s movie’s take, raking in over $350m, and to make matters worse, it also got a sequel just three years later, with a third film due to be released in December 2026.
If life were fair, then Gosling, Crowe (both of whom have bird-themed names, incidentally), Shane Black, and everyone else involved with The Nice Guys would have become multi-millionaires overnight, but instead, people paid money hand over fist for a film based on a game you play on the toilet.
