Along with Dune: Part Two, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the best blockbuster of the year so far. Granted it’s not quite as good as its forerunner Mad Max: Fury Road, but then that’s one of the best blockbusters of the last 20 years, so no shame there. As prequels (a notoriously tricky medium to get right) go, Furiosa is a belter, capturing the same giddy rush as its predecessor. Both audiences and critics, by and large, have responded enthusiastically to its antic charms.
Unfortunately, though, all that counts for naught. You see, Furiosa underperformed at the box office in its opening weekend and is therefore destined to forever be regarded as an irredeemable failure. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. In fact, I’m not really sure who does. The box office is a mysterious creature, inscrutable and prone to capriciousness. In Hollywood it is worshipped like a god by execs, analysts and – of course – us journalists, who view it as the ultimate arbiter of a film’s success or failure.
But the line between success and failure can be quite slim. Furiosa was projected to take $40m in the US over the recent Memorial Day extended weekend, but took $32m. That $8m difference might not seem enormous, but in the case of Furiosa – or The Fall Guy, which underperformed by a similar amount a few weeks before – it means everything. It means that on Monday, Hollywood trade publications like Variety will launch their reports on the weekend’s takings with headlines declaring the film a box office dud. Those reports will be aggregated by the wider media, and the narrative of failure will be set.
It’s a narrative that will filter through to audiences weighing up whether to catch the film in question after its first weekend, when it has gone from being an “event” to a flop that you can now probably wait to catch on streaming. For the studios, that narrative will lessen the incentive to continue backing a losing horse. In the case of The Fall Guy, that means cutting your cinematic losses by rush-releasing the film on to video-on-demand (VOD) platforms just over a fortnight after its theatrical opening, a decision that, naturally, will make viewers far less likely to see it in cinemas.
It’s unclear whether something similar will happen to Furiosa – though the film is already scheduled to be released on VOD at the end of June, so the point is a little academic. But what does seem likely is that a mooted third film in George Miller’s latest Mad Max series will not happen. In 2024, it is near-impossible to recover from an underwhelming opening weekend at the box office. The idea of a film building a head of steam through a slow-burn campaign or word of mouth seems wilfully pie-in-the-sky. The only recent example I can recall is the Sydney Sweeney/Glen Powell romcom Anyone But You, which managed to lure in younger audiences over the festive break, and whose sleeper success caught many in Hollywood by surprise.
The strange thing is that the current front-loaded, first-week, winner-takes-all attitude towards releases goes against the way Hollywood did things for much of its history, when the only model was the slow-burn one. The idea of a “wide release” (opening a film in cinemas all across America at once rather than slowly building up with a region-by-region “limited release”) was only really popularised in the 80s. The same-day global release – now the default for the likes of Marvel movies – didn’t really emerge until the early 2000s. The drip-drip limited release model is still adopted by independent films as well as some of the more indie-leaning studio efforts, and can still enjoy roaring success (Everything Everywhere All At Once being a shining recent example). But for the big tent-pole releases, that opening weekend is all that seems to matter.
Does it have to be this way? This obsession with the box office – as well as judging films by their economic, rather than their artistic value – seems out of step with current times, when streaming is ascendant and the entire industry is undergoing a painful recalibration as a result. In a climate where there is so much competition for attention, it seems a little unreasonable to hold current releases to the standards of a less fractured era, just as we wouldn’t expect today’s TV series to match the massive viewing figures of the days where there were four TV channels.
Which isn’t to say that heads should be buried in the sand. The US box office endured its worst Memorial Day weekend in decades. There hasn’t been a film that has managed a $100m opening weekend, formerly a fairly manageable benchmark for a blockbuster, since Barbie last July. These numbers are certainly instructive for an industry reckoning with seismic change. But when every blockbuster is underperforming – as is the case in 2024, with Dune: Part Two and the moderate success of the latest Planet of the Apes films as rare exceptions – there’s little to be gained by declaring them all flops.
Tellingly, Mad Max: Fury Road (pictured above) was itself only a modest success initially at the box office – and probably lost money when marketing and awards campaigning is factored into its cost. Given this, it’s pretty remarkable that Furiosa was greenlit in the first place – and probably has a lot to do with how its forerunner’s reputation with viewers has grown in the nine years since its release. In a world where box office is the be-all and end-all, that probably wouldn’t have happened.
If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
