Dream Blunt Rotation
The great, the lucrative, and the future of Emily Blunt’s career.
Emily Blunt has been in a lot of movies. In many of them, she’s quite good. For example:
The Muppets (Quite funny!)
Charlie Wilson’s War (Quite hot!)
Looper (Very good, and doesn’t wear facial prosthetics!)
A Quiet Place (Shh!)
The Five-Year Engagement (Quite relatable!)
Oppenheimer (Gets drunk, does laundry. Also relatable!)
And in some of them… Well, she’s fine, but the movies aren’t. For example:
The Huntsman: Winter’s War (Money is good!)
Into The Woods (Hmm…)
Mary Poppins Returns (My mom had a great time!)
Wild Mountain Thyme (Someone @ me, I dare you.)
Jungle Cruise (More on this later)
If you saw someone with a 20+ year career that includes these 10 titles, you might think, “Well, that’s a pretty solid run.” But Emily Blunt’s 20+ year career doesn’t just include those 10 titles. In fact, it includes more than 30 other titles, including three of the most powerful on-screen performances since 2006.
First, there’s her role as Emily in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, a movie that convinced me of three things:
That all women in their 20s working in media in New York City were exactly like Emily’s Emily.
Meryl Streep is the GOAT.
Adrian Grenier is the DOOF(us). He’s a doofus.
Blunt really steals most of her scenes, even when put up against the legend Streep, or the more prominent rising star in Anne Hathaway. But just think, at that point in their careers, if Hathaway and Blunt would’ve switched roles, who could have pulled off either part? Glad we’re aligned.
Second, there’s her role as Rita in 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow, a criminally underrated movie where she has to:
Be a very hot action star.
Be a very hot action star named “Rita Vrataski.”
Be a very hot action star named “Rita Vrataski” who also has chemistry with Tom Cruise.
While Blunt took on a wide range of roles from 2006–2014, I don’t think anyone watched her opposite Jason Segel in The Five-Year Engagement or with Ewan McGregor in Salmon Fishing In The Yemen (DEEP cut for all my Yemen/salmon heads out there) and thought, “Damn, Emily Blunt kicks major ass!” Which is why her surprise turn as a sergeant nicknamed “Full Metal Bitch” is so great. She’s physical, funny, and again, somehow has real chemistry with a potential alien (and no, I don’t mean one of the ridiculous “mimics” in the film (although maybe them too? Who is to say…)).
Third, there’s the role that she undoubtedly got after proving she could play a convincing soldier and/or kick major ass, and that’s as agent Kate Macer in 2015’s Sicario. Let me ask you something: Do you like the Dune movies? What about Narcos on Netflix? How about just lots of closeups of Benicio del Toro’s face? Then go watch Sicario.
With all due respect to Jennifer Lawrence in Joy (it’s quite bad) and Brie Larson in Room (it’s quite badder), it’s criminal that Blunt wasn’t at least nominated for best supporting actress for Sicario. It’s dusty, anxious, and genuinely unnerving to the point where I wonder if maybe her steering into musicals and animated movies was a direct response to the stress of making such a realistic film that opens with a title card saying, “In Mexico, Sicario means hitman.” Chilling shit.
Emily Blunt has done a lot: as a lead, as a supporting character, and as a woman who makes strong eye contact with an imagined nude and deceased communist who’s riding her fictional husband in a government interrogation scene. She’s been funny, charming, and gnarly as hell, which is why she seems like such a natural fit to play opposite Ryan Gosling in the recently released The Fall Guy.
They’re quite funny together, they have real chemistry, and she gets to do some stunts (albeit about 1.7% as much as Gosling, but that’s for good reason if you see the film) throughout the movie. But unlike her costar who–as long as Gosling’s charm does it for you–is fine, Emily Blunt just feels… underutilized and a little hard to believe as her character Jody Moreno — a camera operator-turned-director who falls in love with an aging stuntman, wants nothing more than to make an alien/cowboy movie (sounds familiar...) called Metalstorm, and quite literally wears a lot of hats.
We never really learn anything about Jody, other than her shared love of beaches, margaritas, and making bad decisions with famed stuntman Colt Seavers. Oh, and that she’s also quite fond of Phil Collins. We don’t really know her motivations or dreams, except for making what looks like a truly terrible movie. And yet, Blunt’s still radiant whenever she’s on screen and gets arguably the best pseudo-monologue of the movie when she explains to a recently-arrived Seavers how she’s feeling about not having seen him for over a year through routinely throwing him against a giant rock and telling him about the semi-biographical relationship between her movie’s two romantic leads, one of whom is a female alien and who is a space cowboy.
While it’s not going to be the blockbuster it was advertised to be, The Fall Guy is a good, fun movie that I never plan to spend a second thinking about again, other than the tremendous dog performance by one Jean-Claude who only responds to commands in French. Again, HUGE year for movie dogs. There are cool stunts, some quite funny scenes, and hot people, three things that I’m a big fan of in my action rom-coms. But watching The Fall Guy kept me wondering, “What’s going to happen to Emily Blunt?”
At 41, Blunt has opened a big movie (Mary Poppins Returns made $350 at the box office) and received an Oscar nom (again, sheets), but after The Fall Guy’s performance as a warm commodity at best, we need to look at what else is on the horizon for her. As of May 2024, Blunt has four movies coming down the pipe:
IF: A kids movie about imaginary friends starring Ryan Reynolds and written/directed by her husband, John Krasinski, who also wrote and directed one of her other most successful movies, A Quiet Place.
Jungle Cruise 2: Other than another incredible Jesse Plemons performance as a German u-boat captain/villain, I know nothing about the original film and plan to keep it that way.
Live Die Repeat and Repeat: The rumored sequel to Edge of Tomorrow, which was originally titled Live Die Repeat. While this is somewhat exciting, it seems like we kind of took this to its foreseeable end in the first one. That said, I’m 100% down for more slow-mo combat yoga scenes.
An untitled film about pioneering 1860s detective Kate Warne, which yeah, let’s do it.
If none of those sound particularly noisy or in the same vein as her greatest successes (well, minus the sequel to one of them), it’s because none of them really are. Blunt’s clearly found her comfort zone of Disney live action, sequels, and working with her husband (which, sure, if you were married to John Krasinski, you too might want to hang out with him as much as possible).
But in terms of that Sicario zone where he saw her true potential, there’s still one of more rumored hope of a return: The Smashing Machine. This is the story of famed UFC fighter Mark Kerr and it stars fellow Jungle Cruise person Dwayne Johnson, who is essentially trying to reset his career after a string of duds going back the past five or so years.
It’s also being directed by Benny Safdie in his solo film directorial debut after splitting up with his brother post-Uncut Gems to make The Curse. Besides the facts that Johnson is apparently taking this movie very seriously and Safdie clearly wants to show he can make good films without his brother, this feels like a return to tonal form for Blunt, who’s set to play Mark Kerr’s wife in a role that will find her in the center of an opioid-rattled marriage and the early wild west days of MMA.
Will it be her movie? Not exactly, but if The Rock and Safdie want to make this truly impactful, it’s going to be Blunt’s humanity that prevents The Smashing Machine from getting lost somewhere amongst The Wrestler, Warrior, and The Iron Claw. Also, while I’m sure Johnson put in a good word for Blunt, I like imagining that Safdie thought of her for the role immediately after the two of them last appeared on screen together.
Hopefully, each of these films comes to fruition and Emily Blunt can go back to doing what she does best: be alluring, charming, and kick major ass. And while we’ve seen her take on a wide range of great roles so far in her career, let’s hope the next 20 years make us forget they ever existed. Well, almost forget.
