Fall (2022 film)

Fall is a 2022 survival thriller film directed and co-written by Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank. Starring Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Mason Gooding and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the film follows two women who climb a 2000 ft television broadcasting tower, before becoming stranded at the top.

It was theatrically released in the United States on August 12, 2022 by Lionsgate Films. It was a box office success, grossing $21 million worldwide against a $3 million budget.

Plot
Best friends Becky and Hunter are climbing a mountain with Becky's husband Dan, who loses his footing and falls to his death. A year later, Becky has given up climbing and becomes an alcoholic recluse and contemplates suicide. She has estranged herself from her father, James, because he disapproved of her relationship with Dan. Just before the anniversary of Dan's death, Hunter invites Becky to climb the decommissioned 2000 ft B-67 TV Tower in the desert before it is demolished the following winter. Hunter tells Becky that she can scatter Dan's ashes from the top as a form of healing. A fearful Becky initially refuses before accepting, hoping to finally move on from Dan's death.

The next day, Hunter and Becky arrive and successfully climb a severely corroded ladder to a tiny platform at the top of the tower, where Becky scatters Dan's ashes. As the two begin their descent, however, the ladder breaks, stranding them several hundred feet above the next intact section and almost two thousand feet above the ground. Moreover, the backpack with their water and a small quadcopter drone have fallen onto a communications dish, just beyond the reach of their rope.

Despite the remote location, Hunter is initially confident that emergency services will notice the crash of the ladder, but help never arrives. They try to use their cellphones, but find that radio interference from the communications dish is blocking the signal. Hunter tries sending a message for help by packing her phone in one of her shoes and dropping it out of range of the interference, but the phone is destroyed upon impact with the ground before the message can be transmitted.

The pair later notice two men camping in an RV nearby and get their attention with a flare gun found in an emergency box on the platform. The men see it, but instead of helping them, they steal Hunter's car and drive off.

As the night falls, Becky notices a tattoo on Hunter's ankle: "1-4-3", a numeric code Dan used to tell Becky that he loved her. Hunter tearfully admits to a four-month affair that ended shortly before Becky and Dan's wedding, but Becky is unmoved by her apologies. The next day, in penance, Hunter climbs to retrieve the backpack but nearly falls to her death. She injures her hands in the process, but successfully ties the rope to the bag, and Becky uses all of her remaining strength to pull both Hunter and the backpack up. Becky uses the tower's aviation obstruction lighting warning light to charge the drone and sends it to a nearby motel a few miles away with a written message for help, but it is struck by a truck and destroyed while flying over a road.

At night, Becky is delirious from the lack of food and water, but in a brief lucid moment, when she asks Hunter for her other shoe to pad it with her phone inside, Becky realizes Hunter had actually fallen onto one of the communication dishes when retrieving the backpack and was killed; Becky has been hallucinating her presence since then. The next day, Becky is awakened by a vulture gnawing at her wounded leg, and kills and eats it. Her strength partially restored, Becky climbs down to the dish where Hunter's body lies and types a text message to her father. She then puts the phone into Hunter's shoe for protection, shoves it into a hole in the corpse's abdomen, and pushes it off the tower. Hunter's body cushions the impact and the message transmits. Becky's father alerts emergency services, who then rush to the tower. She is rescued and reunited with her father.

Filming
Originally the film was intended as a short. According to director Scott Mann, the idea came to him while he was shooting Final Score at a stadium in the UK: "We were filming at height, and off camera we got into this interesting conversation about height and the fear of falling and how that's inside of all of us, really, and how that can be a great device for a movie." Fall was filmed in IMAX format in the Shadow Mountains in California's Mojave Desert. The look of the fictitious B67 tower in the film was inspired by the real KXTV/KOVR tower, a radio tower in Walnut Grove, California, which is 2049 ft high and one of the tallest structures in the world.

According to director Scott Mann, the filmmakers considered green screen or digital sets, but ultimately opted for the real thing. They decided to build the upper portion of the tower on top of a mountain so that the actors would appear to be thousands of feet in the air, even though in real life they were never more than a hundred feet off the ground. Currey and Gardner were offered stunt doubles, but they opted to perform their own stunts. Filming was difficult, because often weather such as lightning and strong winds posed a challenge. The film cost $3 million to produce.

Post-production
Although the film was produced by Tea Shop Productions and Capstone Pictures, once production finished, Lionsgate Films acquired the film's distribution rights without a minimum guarantee for the producers. After it did well in test screenings, Lionsgate decided to release it in theaters. They ordered the crew to change or remove over 30 uses of the word "fuck" from the film so it could earn a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association instead of a likely R rating, to increase profitability.

As reshooting the scenes would have been time-consuming and expensive, they turned to Flawless, a company established in 2021 by Nick Lynes and Fall director Scott Mann, to deepfake the actor's faces and artificially redub the "fucks" they said to PG-13-acceptable epithets like "freaking." The first project to use Flawless's services, Fall did earn a PG-13 rating. According to Mann, "neural reshoots" were completed within two weeks during the final stages of post-production. This method was also applied to foreign language dubbing for overseas distribution including Spanish and Japanese.

Release
The film was released in theaters in the United States on August 12, 2022 by Lionsgate, who spent $4 million releasing and promoting the film.

It was released digitally on September 27, 2022, followed by Blu-ray and DVD releases on October 18, 2022.

Box office
Fall grossed $7.2 million in the United States and Canada, and $14.6 million in other territories, for worldwide total of $21.8 million, against its $3 million budget.

In the United States and Canada, Fall was released alongside Mack & Rita and the wide expansion of Bodies Bodies Bodies, and projected to gross $1–2 million from 1,548 theaters on its opening weekend. It made $923,000 on its first day, and went on to debut to $2.5 million. While finishing 10th at the box office, it was the highest-earning new release for the week.

Critical response
Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale, while those at PostTrak gave it an overall 69% positive score, with 44% saying they would definitely recommend it.

Future
Following the popularity of the film's Netflix release, a sequel was announced to be in development in March 2023. In October 2023, it was revealed that two sequels were concurrently in development, while the associated studios viewed Fall as a franchise. Scott Mann will serve as producer on both movies, while also serving as co-writer and director of the third movie. The two sequels will feature returning characters from the first installment and a new supporting cast as well. Mark Lane, James Harris, Christian Mercuri, and David Haring will serve as additional producers. The projects will be joint-venture productions between Tea Shop Productions, Flawless Productions Inc., and Capstone Pictures. Principal photography is scheduled to commence on the second movie in June 2024.

By May 2024, Peter and Michael Spierig were announced as the co-directors for the first sequel movie, from a script co-authored by Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank; while Mark Lane, James Harris, Christian Mercuri, David Haring, and Scott Mann will serve as producers. The third installment will be written/directed by Mann thereafter.