Audience indifference to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga drove the Memorial Day Weekend box office to a 26-year low.
As of now, both will top out at $31 million over the four-day holiday weekend. That’s not the end of the world for Garfield. The family movie’s reported production budget was just $60 million. Add another $30 million for promotion, and the fact it has already made $66 million worldwide means it might eke out a profit.
Furiosa is shaping up to be a financial catastrophe. It cost $168 million to produce, so let’s call it an even $200 million with promotion costs (which might be generous). That puts break-even at around $400 million. The global take this weekend is a dreadful $59 million.
The answer is what’s been going wrong with Hollywood for the last five years… It’s not the pandemic. It’s not the strike. It’s not a lack of product. The problem is the product—the product quality.
Only a select audience would cast an actress in a Mad Max movie that breaks from traditional expectations. Who wants to watch a character running around in a new narrative style? Look at this. What happened to this? Or this?
The shift in creative direction has changed the tone of entertainment.
Engaging characters and narratives matter.
Imagine the following…
Imagine if this Mad Max movie was set 40 years after Thunderdome and returned a grizzled and aging Mel Gibson to the title role. Max is now in his sixties, he lives a solitary but relatively comfortable life in the Wasteland thanks to a secret and camouflaged area where he’s built a self-sustaining compound. He’s survived all these decades by looking out for himself—Max is still the embittered loner who saw his family murdered. But one day he grudgingly violates his solitary code to help someone. This allows the bad guys to find him, and now they want his compound. Max is outnumbered but not unprepared, so let’s get it on.
Sure, we’ve all seen that boilerplate a million times, but it’s boilerplate for a reason, and I’d watch it with enthusiasm. Oh, and it wouldn’t cost a quarter of a billion dollars.
Hey, I’m a free man in a free country… I could’ve gone to see Mad Max with a New Narrative last night, and my fantastic employers would’ve reimbursed the price of the ticket and overpaid me to write a review. Easy-peasy. There’s a theater less than 20 minutes from where my spouse and I are camped. Want to know what we did instead? We hunkered down in the camper in front of our 24-inch TV to rewatch Lonesome Dove (1989) for the fifth time.
In fact, as much as I love the Mad Max series, including Fury Road, I might never see Furiosa. There’s no compelling reason to see it. You could say I’m on the fence. You could also say that a little compelling storyline probably would tip me toward an eventual Redbox rental.
Finally, as you read all the Hollywood Media Sycophants manufacture excuses for the 2024 box office being down more than 40 percent since 2019… As they manufacture nonsense like this beauty — “Many aren’t in the habit of moviegoing yet” — watch all that shameless propaganda collapse into a pile a provable lies when Deadpool & Wolverine blows the doors off movie theaters in a few weeks.
Why…?
Because that’s a movie people actually want to see.
