LOS ANGELES Hollywood expected Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga to burn up the box office over the holiday weekend. Instead, Warner Bros.’ big-budget prequel ice.
Furiosa, which cost $168 million to make, not including tens of millions of dollars in marketing costs, collected about $25.6 million in the United States and Canada overnight from Thursday to Sunday. Box office analysts expected the film to gross about $5.4 million on Monday, for a total of $31 million for the holiday weekend.
It would be the worst Memorial Day weekend result in 43 years when adjusted for inflation since Bustin Loose, a comedy-drama starring Richard Pryor, collected $24 million in 1981. (Box records- office exclude 2020, when most theaters were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.)
The franchise’s previous chapter, Mad Max: Fury Road, grossed $45.4 million in 2015, or about $61 million in today’s dollars, not including the holiday weekend.
Hollywood had high expectations for Furiosa, which Warner Bros. premiered at the Cannes Film Festival; the film received exceptional reviews. On Sunday, however, it was unclear whether Furiosa would even take the top spot at the box office. Analysts said the poorly reviewed Garfield (Sony), which cost $60 million to make, could pull ahead. This could also be a tie.
Sony declared victory, saying it expected Garfield, produced and financed by Alcon Entertainment, to be number one, with $31.8 million in ticket sales. With the summer holidays starting this week, the film is well-positioned for a long theatrical run, Sony said, adding that it had successfully revived the lasagna-loving character as a film franchise.
Why were there fewer moviegoers than expected for Furiosa? Warner Bros. declined to comment, but the film capital was full of theories. One involved Anya Taylor-Joy, who played the title role in Furiosa.
The 28-year-old actress has been on the rise for nearly a decade, gaining attention in 2015 for The Witch, an arthouse horror film, and winning awards in 2020 for playing a chess prodigy in trouble in The Queens Gambit, a Netflix miniseries. But she had never presented a big-budget summer film.
Increasing the pressure, Taylor-Joy took over the role of Furiosa from Charlize Theron, now 48, who helped make Mad Max: Fury Road a hit in 2015.
Movie fans don’t want prequel origin stories, in which the franchise’s important characters are played not by the actor who created and defined them, but by a younger, less famous artist, Scott wrote Saturday Mendelson, a box office analyst who publishes a subscription newsletter.
Furiosa, directed by George Miller and starring Chris Hemsworth, may have been released too soon after the similar film Dune: Part Two, which generated giant ticket sales in March, some film executives said. At the same time, they added, Furiosa may have been released too long after Fury Road, allowing Mad Max’s fan base to cool off.
There has also been a lack of momentum at the box office, noted Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. Hollywood’s summer season kicked off with The Fall Guy, which this month hit $28 million in ticket sales, the lowest summer kickoff since 1995.
The April box office suffered from a shortage of films, which studios blamed on lingering fallout from 2023 union strikes.
The current malaise shows the importance of the health of the market as a whole in the months leading up to this all-important movie season, Dergarabedian said in an email.
Theaters in the United States and Canada are expected to sell about $125 million in tickets over the weekend, down about 40% from last year, according to Comscore. For the year to date, ticket sales in the two countries totaled $2.6 billion, down 22% from the same period last year, Comscore said.
Dergarabedian is optimistic, however.
