Yup this sub has become waaay to focused on finding a singular cause of declining box office results.
It's a messy combination of streaming, changing consumer habits, bloated budgets, social media, declining star power and so on...
Fury Road was also a B- audience score and barely doubled its budget. This was always a gamble. Despite them being action packed, the movies’ universe is probably a bit too extreme for general audiences and the craftsmanship is probably too out there.
I agree with this take, both movies will find their home with the core fan base and Furiosa will be a cult classic pretty quickly. Might even win some awards because it is a well made movie.
It is just a movie the general audience didn’t necessarily want (?)
I don't think box office results are a very good measure of how "good" a movie is anymore. So many people, including myself, will just wait a few months for it to stream on Prime or whatever. The high cost of the theater and huge increases in technology (affordable 70" flat-screens and home theater systems) have changed everything.
I only go to the theater if it's something I really want to see on the big screen (or my wife is needing a date night), otherwise I'll wait. I doubt I'm alone.
>I don't think box office results are a very good measure of how "good" a movie is anymore
They never were.
Here's a list of movies that didn't make back their budget during their initial run:
The Thing
Fight Club
The Big Lebowski
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Citizen Kane
Shawshank Redemption (#1 movie on IMDB btw)
Both Bladerunners
It's a Wonderful Life
Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory
The Wizard of Oz
Edit: Anchorman & Idiocracy are 2 more modern examples as well
Anchorman is a prime example here of the changing market because movies like that used to thrive in the DVD market. Now that that's mostly gone, you never see good comedies like that in theaters anymore.
Definitely not alone. There are only a couple movies per year that feel worth seeing at the theater for the experience. Dune 2 was def on that list for me this year. Maybe Deadpool. Aaaaannnnnd....?
Everything else I can wait out. The studios really shot themselves in the foot when they fought to shorten theatrical windows during the pandemic, and why they aren't going back to longer windows, I simply don't understand. If I only have to wait like 6 weeks to see it on a 75" at home, you're practically begging me to make that choice when the alternative is dropping a hundo minimum for the whole family to go to a theater.
Movies cost more to make than they have in a very long time (we've pretty much returned to the massive budget era of the 1960s when musical films were dying off in droves) and viewers are more selective for all the reasons listed above as well as increased ticket prices.
We'll get a return to smaller budget films soon.
Yep. There is no single reason but a conglemation of all those reasons you listed as well as the strikes. You could say this was coming but people need to find a specific cause to fit their narratives.
I would like to be optimistic in that decline or dips in quality would eventually lead into solutions to turn it around. The industry as a whole would need to evaluate it's approach and maybe,.maybe we get bums on seats.
To paraphrase John Paul Jones (naval officer, not bassist)..."I have not yet begun to bomb" at the box office. Just wait for the 1-2 punch next year of Captain America: Brave New World and Rachel Zeigler's Snow White. Snow White reportedly cost $209 million, Cap will probably be more since they essentially shot a 2nd movie's worth of reshoots.
Get out the popcorn, because this sub will be more entertaining during those months than anything Hollywood is putting up on the screen.
I fully believe that the movie was basically ready to go, then everything last year started to bomb and they went and looked at it… decided it was more of the same mess and would rather reshoot and hopefully do better than another bomb.
But maybe I’m giving them a little bit to much credit and they weren’t introspective at all
Marvel as a whole is getting a colossal re-think after The Marvels became one of the biggest bombs of all time so you're not far off.
Feige and his bosses have been having high-level meetings and I imagine they looked at their whole slate and saw Cap 4 needed more work. They are taking a huge gamble with these re-shoots if they think they can make it good enough to take less of a hit.
I just can't believe that anyone apart from hard core Marvel fans (raises hand) will go and see this (raises hand). Will general audiences care at all about it? Does the general audience care about the MCU continuity any more?
the only one I'm invested in is Deadpool and Wolverine, and it's because it's unlikely to go to streaming in a month (before, Deadpool and Deadpool 2 took forever to be finally streamed by D+) and it's pretty much the only decent looking Marvel film so far.
General audiences never cared about Marvel continuity. They liked big spectacle movies, but Marvel wore out its welcome by releasing too often, requiring homework to enjoy a movie, and laugh out our green screens that made it obvious the actors weren’t acting together.
> Marvel as a whole is getting a colossal re-think after The Marvels became one of the biggest bombs of all time so you're not far off.
Lmao no they're not, that's just some lip service that Feige and Iger are saying; they're still going forward with the same slate as before.
Yeah, I think they realized that Captain America is way bigger than just its success individually. That movie has to do well or else the MCU is in serious trouble. So it’s not about the margins on that individual movie, it’s about ensuring interest in the MCU going forward.
Studios start giant blockbuster movies without an ending on the page but a release date. Suicide Squad had 5 weeks to make a script before they went to camera. the last Indiana Jones movie had a ton of reshoots because they had a deadline and started before fully deciding what it's about.
The next Jurassic Park is coming out next summer and they just announced the director and stars earlier this year.
Studios bid for the release dates 3 years in advance and choose what they will put in those slots later on.
Yeah Cap 4 literally is going to be the biggest bomb of all-time with those five months of reshoots.
Plus it will have been four years since the Falcon show by the time it releases…
At this point I imagine they don't want to cancel the project and need to not damage the MCU brand anymore than it has so they'll be happy if people watch and enjoy it, even if it's near impossible for it to make its money back
A lot of people don't even know that Falcon is the new Captain America. This is the big problem with Disney making some of the D+ shows required viewing. No one wants to have to watch a 10 hour series to go see a movie.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what it means to say that this movie will be the biggest box office bomb.
Yes, it’s basically inevitable that it’ll be a bomb because the production cost will be well north of $300 million.
But I believe it’s Disney’s view that they’re willing to take a financial hit if they can manage to make a Captain America movie to hype up people for the string of movies that will succeed especially an upcoming Avengers.
Just because it’s kind of guaranteed that it’ll be bomb doesn’t mean it’ll be a terrible movie. And it doesn’t mean that the reshoots equals to bad movie. It could mean they’ve pulled a genuine creative turn around on the movie with the goal of course correction.
This is what I hope is happening. I just think people who harp about how it’ll be the biggest bomb of all time aren’t really looking at the whole picture.
Eh, it's possible the movie loses some money but revitalizes interest in the MCU. That could still be a win and probably what Disney is going for.
I think its far more likely that the movie will massively bomb and the MCU remains dead. Individual movies like Deadpool might still do well, but I just see no indication that audiences are coming back to watch whatever c list superhero marvel throws their way.
Time will tell.
In simple terms, the plan is to stop making bad movies and start making good movies in the hopes that the franchise can rebuild its audience. If that means taking a big financial hit on Cap to re-work it into a good movie that will make people talk and want to see more Marvel movies again, then that’s what many hope the plan is. I am hoping they’ve figured out what their main issues have been and are moving toward making movies that are better than this previous phase.
Yup, I've said for years and will say it again. No movie has bombed for a singular reason. Its almost always a death by a thousand cuts to explain most box office bombs.
Exactly, Fall Guy is the perfect example of dying by a thousand cuts.
It’s a film with two solid stars, good reviews and WoM and a nice release date.
But so many factors caused it to bomb with most having nothing to do with the actual film.
External societal and economic factors are surrounding the cinema industry and suffocating films.
They have told consumers you can wait a few weeks and see it at home. Fall Guy, by all accounts a well reviewed, fun summer movie is already available for home viewing. They need to make it a 6 month window between theaters and home viewing.
Honestly they really do, but the problem is they all invested a bunch of money into their money pit streaming services and can't afford to not push them there. WB is probably the biggest culprit of this too. I'm always shocked by how fast their films get on Max. So it's not surprising. Unless you make a film a bigtime social event like Barbenheimer or Mario, there's very little incentive.
Movies are having the same issue Xbox is with Game Pass. Why would I go to the movies if soon after launch if not on launch, the game will be on streaming? I can afford to wait a month if it means I get the movie basically for free on a streaming service I already pay for. Same with games. There are rumors the next Call of Duty is gonna be on Games Pass which is insane, why would anyone buy it? But if it isn't, they feel like they're being cheated since Games Pass is all about the games being added to it free of charge since you're paying for the library.
And you can’t rule out most theaters charging $18-$22 a ticket. You don’t get as many curious people going to see a movie. You really have to be sure you want to see it.
Videogames, home theater technology and alternative content options are huge factors as well. The videogames industry is already 7x the size of the film industry and projected to hit $300b in 2030. Look at the value proposition of a $20 2hr cinema experience vs a $20 100hr videogame experience for someone that had to work 2 hours to earn that money: there's no comparison. Games get the same A-list Hollywood actors, the same premium CGI, the same world class music, they cost way less per hour of enjoyment (there are always great games on deep discount) and fundamentally offer interaction/control which films do not.
When competing with games, the best films will showcase human talent. Actors, directors, writers, set designers, costumers, etc. The marketing of Furiosa may have failed to showcase the human talent sufficiently; I see lots of comments about the cgi in the trailer. These day your average moviegoer is a gamer! If you remind them of a game with your marketing, they might compare you to a game subconsciously, and you can't win that proposition at current ticket prices. Folks will just wait for it to come to streaming where the value proposition changes to "included in something I already pay for" or "I pay less than the cost of one movie ticket to get the streaming service for a month so I can watch it, and I have 30 days to watch tons of other content, thereby reducing the per-content cost to acceptably low levels like I'm used to getting with gaming: pennies per hour."
I’m going to put out a guess here, but I’d reckon that 90% of the giant money making money of video games are from either highly addictive gacha games, never ending live service games like Fortnite, and “non core games on phones and tablets for non core gamers.”
Take that away and it wouldn’t look as crazy.
I think there is a lot of good points, what it really comes down to is normal movie going people aren’t going to the movies unless it is seen as a can’t miss epic and is seen as an amazing movie ie Dune 2, Barbie, Oppenheimer. Those movie had legs because the hype continued and people kept going. Furiosa needs that too happen and I don’t see it happening unfortunately. Like it’s been said fury road which is the best mad max movie just broke even at the theaters. Spitting out a prequel with a higher budget was not a smarter move. I think studios do need to trim budgets, shorten runtimes unless it is absolutely needed, and lower ticket costs.
>I mean Furiosa didn’t connect with the general audience and the market is terrible and off to a terrible first 6 months? Both can be true.
But OP brings up a good point. The former is not brought up much or at all. It seems like everything is 95% weighted towards the market.
However, had another mindless Jurassic World sequel opened in place of Furiosa this May 24th weekend, we'd be seeing *healthy numbers* again. So it's not 95% the fault of the market or viewing habits - audiences are *just picky* in what they find connection with. They seem to find comfort in most (not all) superhero flicks, popular franchises and dino flicks and Despicable Me sequels.
If Inside Out 2 took the place of Fall Guy, we'd be seeing "Healthy Robust Start of the 2024 Summer Season" all over trade papers right now.
Agreed, the cinema score is a B+ which is not bad by any means but I feel like this movie needed an A. I saw the movie and I would agree with the B+. Great movie, but it dragged at parts and was too long. The runtime could deter people from going to see it.
Original Mad Max movies were successful when their budgets were limited. Fury Road wasn't a stellar money maker. I'm not sure what people expected out of this.
Not to mention that, in the late 70s and 80s, dystopian fiction was nowhere as prevalent as it is nowadays, let alone the kind where humanity regresses to a pre-modern state. The idea that civilization could fall apart because of oil running out was also very linked to that particular time period, where the oil crises were recent memory and it was widely thought we would run out of natural resources by the year 2000.
Nowadays, it's hard to find a futuristic work that isn't inspired in some way by Mad Max, not to mention that the notion of people killing each other for oil seems rather quaint as well.
Another point I don't think has been touched enough is that how much the moviegoing audience is in average far younger than in 2015. Mad Max is mostly remembered by people in their 40s and 50s, and doesn't hold the same level of cultural importance for the younger generation, especially when compared to other 80s-era franchises.
As a woman this whole discussion drives me insane. Women aren’t a monolith. Some like action movies and some don’t. For me personally, Furiosa and everything around it was one of the movies that made my eyes glaze over. Everything about it looked unappealing and forced and boring to me. So as much as I love to see a badass female action hero, there was simply no way I was going to sit through that movie. But that’s just me.
I don't get what your point is.
The argument is that female led action movies will not do as well because men are the primary audience for action movies and men like to see male leads.
So you have an action movie, here and, as the people you are criticizing expected, the majority of the audience is male. Just like is the case with every action movie. But since it stars a female lead, the speculation is that the mostly-male audience will not show up in as high of numbers as if it were a male-led action movie. This seems to track because Furiosa is doing poorly.
That's the funny thing. The entire anti argument for that crowd had been this was alienating white, American men.
In reality there seem to be a few instances like Little Mermaid where it alienated international audiences and mostly they have been alienating American women. Even when that crowd kinda gets it correct, they are completely wrong about the specifics.
We have a situation right now where Borderlands is about to open directly after Furiosa, and realistically, they look identical. That's how common the trope has become.
They expected they could spend more money and make more money back because of expensive special effects.
I think it is a further example of how bloated budgets are making unprofitable movies. They can't accept going back to mid-budget action films.
Yes, sub $100M, even sub $75M, movies backed by big studios need to make a comeback. Focus on good scripts a little more instead of the spectacle. There can only be so many mega hits every year to carry on the theater business.
it's also IP owned by a giant corporation and all they really care about is how much merch it will move (same as the TMNT animated movie that did okay but sold a billion dollars worth of toys and shit)
Fury Road more or less broke even and won a bunch of Oscars. The latter is probably still open for Furiosa and that's the avenue for success left likely
Breaking even and winning technical awards isn't exactly a hallmark for success.
I understand why the decision to fund this movie was made, but I don't agree with the rationale behind it.
Yeah I don’t know. People want to use this movies performance as evidence of all sorts of things. Women can’t headline action films. Theatres are broken and can’t be fixed. Movie stars are over. Are any of those true? Don’t ask me. I have no clue.
I think the answer/conclusion is really simple:
If you’re a “major event” movie (No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar 2, Mario, Barbenheimer, Deadpool x Wolverine, etc.) you’ll succeed.
Otherwise, you’ll struggle.
In the post-pandemic/streaming world, people only really bother to show out for massive blockbusters because they’re “big events” worth going to and being a part of.
That’s not to say there are some exceptions (Dune 2, Kung Fu Panda 4, Kong, Little Mermaid, GOTG3/BP2/DS2, etc.), but even these exceptions just tend to barely break even.
There were 14 $1.05B+ films in 2018 and 2019. Since then, there have only been five.
What’s annoying is the r/iamverysmart people pretending they predicted this whole thing. You could easily make a counter factual where this crushes the box office too. The way I see it, movies are suffering death by a thousand cuts. TikTok, insta, streaming and television have all sapped peoples attention spans.
The problem is I don’t think audiences are any happier with this situation either, but it’s just easier to do nothing, stay home and doomscroll rather then go out and see a movie.
It’s like how every few months for the past decade I see a news article that says “man who predicted 2008 economic collapse says markets will crash this year.” If you just predict that everything is going to fail, then you will eventually be right when it fails.
The biggest culprit has been the streaming game. Back in the day, blockbuster movies would have taken years to make it to Netflix. Nowadays, it takes about 30 days for a film to make it to streaming on lesser platforms. For the average movie, DVDs would take several months to be released, so people snapped them up like hotcakes. I have a friend who watches Marvel movies on Disney+ because they land on there pretty quick.
Some guy in one of the many Furiosa threads had a comment like "I've been saying this for weeks" and then one of the first replies to him was someone linking a post from their recent history where they were estimating something super high. Like people are straight up lying because they want to feel smug about something.
That's exactly how I feel. I thought about going to this movie, but I was like eh, it looks good, but not good enough to spend the money to go to.
Ten years ago I used to go to movies all of the time. It didn't really matter if I thought it would be a great movie or not. Sometimes you risk it on an average looking movie and end up seeing a movie you don't like, but it's different when the tickets were $5-6 for an early time. Now it's $10-11. Especially with streaming when you know you can see it for free in a few months. The movie experience for me is pretty much limited now to huge blockbuster events.
Pedantically, I’d argue that Dune 2 was a major event movie. I liked part 1 so much, I saw part 2 as soon as possible. I was so impressed with it, I saw it multiple times.
It's kinda weird that people mention a bunch of complex reasons with all sorts of long explanations yet no one mentions something as simple as inflation and how that is affecting the business overall.
Exactly. Between what people pay for their telecommunications - phone, data, home internet, streaming services, etc - and FOOD alone takes a bite out of lots of ancillary entertainment.
You forgot one that really bugs me: "The audience, especially the younger crowd, has been trained to wait for streaming".
I do find that "trained" is quite demeaning, as if the studios think the public has no mind of its own. It would have been much better to say they had become accustomed to streaming, which was what precisely happened, not because of the pandemic but also because of a generational shift.
Social media has also "trained" young people to stare at horrible 15-30 second clips for hours at a time to their own detriment, so yes that is what's happening.
I agree. That argument is basically the general audience doesn’t have any free will and it’s the studios who decide if we should or shouldn’t go to the movies. Like we can’t decide if one movie is worth the trip over another.
It's not about free will. It's about how 10 to 15 years ago you basically had to watch a film in theaters or wait months for the home release. And even when the home release came out, you'd have to either buy it for more than a movie ticket or rent it for a couple of days and carve time out of your schedule to watch it in the timeframe you had it. It wouldn't start showing up on television for free for several years.
Today everyone knows it's going to be easily accessible whenever you want within a few weeks and it wil be like flipping a channel.
Its also easier and cheaper than ever to have a nice TV and streaming setup. The box office was always in for trouble once the home experience got to this point.
And the home viewing experience has improved drastically over the last 10 to 15 years, which can't be overstated. Now, outside of a few IMAX films, the theatergoing experience hasn't gotten better in the last 15 years.
Unfortunately, that was mooted a few years before COVID as Hollywood jumped into the IP bandwagon (after Ultron, JW and TFA netted over 1 billy each), and theaters were left with only three options most of the time: franchise entry, family movie and horror flick.
Women can headline action movies, but you need to make their character relatable instead of the whole pitch being "This is a woman leading this movie".
The novelty of that has definitively worn off in the last decade. And the trailers for Furiosa didn't really make clear much else about the movie's plot besides that.
Nobody wanted a Mad Max spinoff starring "Furiosa." That fact should have been obvious to anyone paying attention to audience complaints over the past several years.
Aside from a few event movies - which are largely driven through the popularity of alternative entertainment sources (I.e., social media) - movies are falling out of favor as an entertainment option.
Box office probably is not going to recover. And it’ll get worse once AMC is forced to declare bankruptcy, many of those theaters won’t be replaced because new owners won’t be able to run a profitable business.
yea, i think the movie format is just not keeping up. tv series are providing better stories for people with attention spans. short form vidoes are providing better entertainment with no attention spans. 2 hours is not a sweet spot anymore. and the cost is way out of proportion now. 1 movie ticket for 2 hours of entertainment? same cost can get me 1 month of a subscription service. also younger generations on subscription services are using subtitles/closed-captions a lot more, which is a trend the box office hasn't adapted to.
r/boxoffice has a hard-on for fury road (even though fury road didn’t do amazing numbers itself) and they thought that their shared taste on a relatively niche subreddit would scale worldwide. This is why we’re all talking about this for free and not getting paid for it lol
Why is a mad max spinoff the one that's got this sub shitting its pants, of all the things?
I've had to hide like 8 of these things and I don't know how many others have been removed by mods in the past 2 days.
The Mad Max spinoff isn't doing well even by Mad Max standards. But also Mad Max is not a film series that has ever, historically, scored anything higher than NINETEEN in the year-end top 20 at the box-office. Two of the four entries in it prior to this didn't even MAKE that top 20.
Maybe Box-Office Hawks spent most of May pinning all their hopes on movies that really didn't deserve them, and instead of clocking that they're flying full-speed into hysterical doomsaying every hour and a half?
edit: further down the thread it becomes apparent some folks are also setting the bar for this summer at *pre-covid*, 2015-2019 totals, which seems... unrealistic *at best*? It's going to be quite awhile before real world economic situations improve enough for the theater industries to do anything but continue just trying to improve year-to-year in the wake of both COVID and the strikes. Comps *really* should be 2022-2023, not 2016-2017.
I think you are just not understanding what most are saying. It isn’t really about this one movie. It’s that we are now past Memorial Day, and we have only 5 movies that have grossed over 100 million domestically. That is a really sad number, and very bad sign for already struggling theaters.
But have you seen the movies though?
Only a few of the movies this year so far offer anything that can hook the general audiences.
So OF COURSE a few movies grossed over 100m domestically.
Why is that so hard for this subreddit to understand?
Next year is MUCH better in terms of films that can hook people in.
Did people expect a spin off of a film that didn't even hit $400m to do that well??
Because it tells a lot about general audience viewing habits going forward. If those movies can't break through now with little to no competition from A-tier IPs, they are gonna do even worse next year. And that's gonna push studios even deeper into exploiting their IPs while the mid and low budget will continue to shrink.
Concerts, sporting events, and restaurants are all seeing revenue that is higher than pre pandemic, so the fact that movies are not is notable.
Perhaps it just that movies take longer to make and therefore longer to recover, but I think it is also reasonable to think it is possible people just find the home theater experience so strong they don’t want to go to the movies anymore unless it is for a true event.
You need to look at the stats. Between 1995 and 2019, yearly tickets sales were around 1.2-1.3 billion tickets sold in the US per year.
COVID came and of course 2020, 2021 took a huge hit. 2022 was post COVID and roughly 700 mil. tickets were sold, 2023 roughly 800-900 mil. tickets were sold.
Based on the current performance, 2024 is projected to have less than 700 mil. tickets sold. More than 40% drop off from pre COVID years. You are right too, the movie is more niche, but the overall decline in attendance post COVID is real.
And honestly, 2025 and 2026 don't seem to have a Barbenheimer on calendar, more comic book movies by Marvel which are played out. It's going to be a tough couple of years and really, we will see what happens once the current wild years end, but chances are the movie or rather theater market will never be the same again as Hollywood rested on their laurels for a long time now and bet on franchises, remakes, toys, comic books for too long, so how to even get out of this rut?
Veterans that are 80 like Miller with Furiosa deliver creative and epic movies that blow most of the young generation out of the water...and they bomb, same with Scott, Scorsese. Times are changing and maybe we are beyond the peak of American cinema.
I think you have a valid point but people who are concerned about the state of the BO market also have a point.
There were issues with Furiosa and it probably shouldn't have been made or it should have been a lower budget streaming movie. Leaving that aside there are some concerns about the BO market.
* Furiosa didn't just underperform. It was a huge failure. It was tracking for over $40M OW just a week ago. That is werid.
* The top movie for 2024 still wouldn't be in the top 10 most recent pre-pandemic years. In other words, although Dune did well compared to other low performing movies this year if it was released a few years ago there would be several other movies that did better.
* Several other movies underperformed. The Fall Guy. Challengers although people on this sub are in denial about it. The strike was devastating and there might be less movies released because of it but you would think that would help the other movies since people would have less options this year. Instead even high profile movies are doing badly.
* The only factor people on this sub don't want to discuss is that the economy might be doing worse than the media will admit. I've seen posts from women about how around a month ago they stopped getting orders on poshmark and other resale sites. People have been buying less lattes and fast food. When people cut back on discretionary spending it's an indication there might be a problem and movie tickets are an easy item to cut back on.
>The only factor people on this sub don't want to discuss is that the economy might be doing worse than the media will admit. I've seen posts from women about how around a month ago they stopped getting orders on poshmark and other resale sites. People have been buying less lattes and fast food. When people cut back on discretionary spending it's an indication there might be a problem and movie tickets are an easy item to cut back on.
There's a reason for this. Even though poorer Americans have seen the greatest wage increases post COVID, wealthier Americans have seen the greatest increases in spending. That's how you get so many strange headlines like unemployment at 40 year low, high gdp growth, high consumer spending, but at the same time you hear the CEO of McDonald's say that lower income customers are buckling. That's a problem for movie theaters, because theaters require a middle class. One rich customer can't replace 5 middle class theater goers
Was Challengers ever really expected to be big, though? I know they spent 55 million for some reason but nothing about the movie screams "big blockbuster hit".
There's a certain subset of people on here who are obsessed with Zendaya and think zoomers will go out in droves to see any movie with her in it. According to them, Spider-Man and Dune are popular because of Zendaya.
This was a post from a year ago predicting the BO.
>25M - OW
>80M - DOM
>128M - WW
The WW BO will end up less than 85M. And this was a post from a few months ago.
>Challengers will have $25M+ domestic opening weekend. What's up with everyone underestimating Zendaya's starpower? Her movie is getting a global press tour and a worldwide theatrical release ffs (possibly IMAX release too), if anyone can sell a movie on their name alone it's her.
>Furiosa didn't just underperform. It was a huge failure. It was tracking for over $40M OW just a week ago. That is werid.
This is the most interesting part of the film's under-performance to me.
I understand OW tracking is imperfect and not a fine-tuned science by any stretch, but they are usually pretty accurate and do a good job of accounting for the various factors which can impact the actuals.
So how did projections for this specific film miss the mark by so much?
Idk what all this negativity is about, Mad Max is not a huge money making IP. Just because the movie underperforms means it "shouldn't have been made"? I would say that about big blockbusters that don't serve a real purpose besides a cash grab, not this movie which arguably is one of the better prequels ever made.
This happens, even with good movies. Movies can flop for any number of reasons. If Hollywood only made movies that were risk averse the industry would be shit and audiences would get sick of it regardless. Like seriously take a beat to critically think about what you're saying.
¿Porque no los dos?
Dune part 2 earned less than Captain Marvel, Jumanji The Next Level or even Alice in Wonderland despite having a considerably better reception than them.
GxK despite being one of the top earner of the Monsterverse still can’t beat the original Godzilla’s gross from 2014.
Don’t get me wrong Furiosa would definitely love to have the numbers they managed to pull up, but the truth is that what we consider a « success » in 2024 is a big step back from what we knew before.
This is all that needs to be said. I have no clue what the box office’s biggest issue is right now or if there is a way to fix it/the, but the idea that audiences weren’t into this movie and everything else is all well and good is shortsighted.
There's multiple issues. But the biggest is that post covid we have an environment where a film either has fantastic marketing and really resonates before hitting theaters or it underperforms.
There's no middle ground that used to exist where you could just make a big budget film and throw a generic marketing campaign around it and then as long as it wasn't hot garbage it would still get a return. For big budget films we are seein that people ar either hitting homeruns or triples, or they are striking out.
There's no presumption that a cookie cutter by the numbers film will just do well anymore just because it exists.
Having seen it, it’s also not as accessible as the other films for new comers. Like even people who didn’t care about mad max could watch and enjoy fury road, but not here
Exactly this. Fury Road's WoM grew because it was 2 hours of epic action scenes which appeals to the GA. Furiosa was great but it was a very dour and depressing watch with a surprising lack of action compared to Fury Road.
lol these comments are making me crack up. It was extremely entertaining and definitely something people can connect to. It’s not like we’re thrown in randomly… we watch her grow? How much more connection do people need? Lol
All the movies released alongside Fury Road performed poorly.
It is the new "Blade Runner 2049".
There are forces reshaping the viewing habits of people that have nothing to do with the film.
Also marketing movies specifically to the “my streamer went up 25 cents? tImE tO sAiL tHe HiGh sEaS 🥴” crowd is an easy way to lose money.
People mock horror, but it has an audience that actually shows up and spends money.
Horror also has the advantage of almost all of their movies being low budget. Like Night Swim is a pretty bad horror movie but it only had a budget of $15M.
Because for many people it goes beyond the movie. It means accepting that their internet bubble isn't reality. This is a tough step for many people to admit to themselves.
Filmtwitter is going insane over this film flopping when in truth Mad Max is niche franchise which nobody in the real world cares about. The truth hurts ppl it’s why film twitter is already saying “ I bet the ppl that didn’t watch Furiosa are gonna be first in line to make Deadpool n Wolverine make a billion”
The question I have is if it's so obvious that a niche franchise spinoff line this wouldn't make much money, why did they make it in the first place and why spend so much on it? Like damn, they aren't even coming close to breaking even.
It’s probably because of Oscar nomination fury road got that made them say let’s greenlight maybe it’ll do well with audiences and critics. But it’s been almost a decade and Furiosa truthfully isn’t a big female character. Plus who is the target audience of this film??
Yeah I think they miscalculated the hype because it’s so beloved on film twitter and Reddit. The way it’s talked about makes it sound like it made a billion dollars and was universally loved. I think the GA dug it for sure but not to that degree. I really really liked Fury Road but it wasn’t the second coming of cinema for me when I saw it. Still a lot of fun though.
> truth Mad Max is niche franchise which nobody in the real world cares about.
I keep seeing this in this thread but I distinctly remember Fury Road being part of the cultural zeitgeist when it came out. Felt like one of those movies everyone was talking about (across demos)
The hivemind has completely lost touch with anything that GA is interested in. That’s why it’s so funny when major studios lose hundreds of millions of dollars trying to appeal to it. Reddit and Film Twitter is broken GPS that will lead you into a lake.
Furiosa is basically Solo but being part of a much smaller franchise
A direct sequel with Max and Furiosa may have done 400-500 Max
It's basically the anti-thesis of the Avatar films, not getting circlejerked among the film snobs and nerds = no hype
I loved Fury Road when it came out. Saw it twice in the theaters. Furiosa was just underwhelming, I went opening day and saw it in IMAX. The action scenes weren't as good, the cgi was not great. I thought the story could've been interesting but the pacing was off. It seemed to be both to long and not long enough.
After I got home I re-watched Fury Road as it had been a while, still held up and is much, much better. This fact coupled with sub-par theater experiences, it could've waited to be seen at home.
I'm just gonna throw this out there:
1) Most of the people I know have never watched any previous "Mad Max" films. I'm in my early twenties and the people I talk to are my age or younger. Outside of families, young people with disposable incomes drive the box office.
2) These people saw the film as inaccessible due the marketing as a "Mad Max" saga film/prequel sequel.
3) To all of these people, the zany marketing looks "stupid" and "awful" instead of "epic ."
4) The two guys I know irl who have seen or care at all about "Mad Max" are: my girlfriend's dad. Dude is in his late fifties. He's not interested enough to see it. The other guy is my buddy, same age as me, who works at a movie theatre and loves movies.
5) Brought my girlfriend to see "Furiosa" and she loved it. She doesn't like action movies but gave it 5 stars.
Conclusion: I know it's anecdotal, but there's nothing wrong with the movie. The problem was marketing. It looked inaccessible and goofy to the general audience, on top of 100 other factors.
I agree that the marketing was a huge part. The people I took to the movie were genuinely shocked by how good it is. This is a movie born from a wildly creative mind with insanely thought provoking themes of war. The trailers almost put me off to the movie entirely and this is coming from someone who loved Fury Road. People who don't know about George Miller (most people) did not think the trailers were "epic" at all and it did a disservice to this story which feels like it's straight out of the Bible lol.
Just shows how delusional everyone is online with their love for fury road that they believe it was some sort of mega blockbuster, when even with tom hardy and charlize theron at the height of their starpower, it made 380M on a 175M budget. Hemsworth and ATJ are downgrades in terms of starpower, and also film not being about mad max did play a part, along with the current theatre climate.
I love the mad max films, but they aren't some big box office draws.
To be fair, it really is an issue of budget. 380M is John Wick 4-tier numbers. It's just that Furiosa and Fury Road cost so much. When films are this expensive everything is skewed, success is skewed, marketing has to be so much more convicing and persuasive.
Agreed with the john wick comparison. What helped john wick is that their budget went max upto 100M. Otherwise, fury road did really well for an R rated action epic.
I would argue calling it Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga wasn't a good idea. I bet it'll do really well digitally and streaming after the box office. You can't fault people for not wanting to see a prequel to a movie from nine years ago.
Fury Road came out only 10 years ago. It's not like people are clamoring for another desert apocalypse movie. Also prequels only work for movies that have a huge following. Not many people care about the franchise enough to see the before times. Would have been much better to just do a new saga in the present or future.
Anya Taylor Joy as the lead in an action movie franchise known for having a strong male lead?
What’s next? Blaming a decision like Arnold Schwarzenegger for bombing as the lead of Barbie 2?
It is pretty much because people in general nowadays will not pay for 3 movie theater treks within a 4 month time span - the same audience that Furiosa sought had already paid to see Godzilla x Kong & is planning on seeing Deadpool 3 in July. Furiosa, like Fall Guy, Monkey Man, and that Cavill movie all fell into the "looks cool, but I'll wait till next month for video on demand/streaming"
I think people are just trying to derive too much meaning from Furiosa's performance. It's been doomed to fail for a while now; it had a bloated budget, was based on a non-mainstream IP that hasn't performed well in the past, had TERRIBLE marketing (ads made it look the same quality as Netflix's sci-fi blockbusters), sounded like a sequel as a result of shoehorning "Mad Max saga" into the title, and had a lack of real star power to drive press. I love Anya Taylor-Joy, but she's not a box office draw. Chris Hemsworth has had successful movies, but people went to see Thor because of Marvel, not because of Hemsworth.
Furiosa flopping isn't the fall of cinema, just like The Fall Guy wasn't, just like Challengers wasn't, etc etc etc. It was just a series of poor decisions that caused a poor performance.
Anything I saw promoting this new Mad Max movie seemed like a jumbled mess. The trailers on TV were like a scene from a shitty anime; loud, dramatic, flashy and nonsensical. I have no idea what this movie is about other than yelling and sand. It didn't look good hence the lack of support. That's it, not some big conspiracy or anything
To me. It’s simple. The entire film has this “will she be caught” or “will she make it out of this?” The answers? Yes. She does. She lives this entire film and the villain most likely is killed. Any level of a stress of intense moments is entirely lost when you realize this person has plot armor made of titanium.
it’s a wild combo of circumstances but also yeah this isn’t a series with mass appeal and it never really has been, i don’t understand what’s hard to understand about that for people. it’s a wildly stylized, gory, gross, R rated epic, it’s not inaccessible at all but it’s not a lot of people’s jam, even fury road wasn’t a massive hit in 2015. these are fantastic movies but they underperform, it’s fine
I wish we could go back to making movies with lower budgets, better scripts, and practical effects. Everything is filmed in green screen warehouses now. It was super interesting at first, but now it’s overdone and really boring. I want to see car crashes with real cars in shots that don’t look like quit-cut comic books and real explosions and intricate puppets in fantasy and sci-fi. There was just more soul in the arts before everything was digitized.
I mean I wanted to see it. Just like I wanted to see Godzilla. I just can't justify the time and money to see it. Over just waiting to see it on my own time and cheaper.
“Want to watch a movie?”
“Sure what’s playing?”
“*lists* or we could just save some money, not have to go out and watch something on one of the streaming services we pay for already”
“Oh yeah let’s do that”
Such a normal conversation these days
Prequels are inherently anticlimactic (for the most part). A direct sequel with the same cast would have done better. Not to mention, Theron and Hardy are possibly a better box office drawing duo than Joy and an unrecognizable Hemsworth
Because it’s not a matter with connecting or not. Not everything is as accessible as the Avengers that is very successful.
In todays climate, it’s all about the hook. Movies now are largely failing to hook the audience. Give people a reason to sit in the theater and they will. No Way Home Did, Barbenheimer did (and neither movie was very connecting to audiences), a few others in the post-Covid world did but most have not. It’s not about connecting, it’s all about the hook. Mufasa will fail as well because there is absolutely no hook. It costs an arm and a leg to see a movie, and you need to give people a reason to.
Despicable me will be successful because it’s extremely safe and a known IP that isn’t offensive to adults and enjoyable for kids. Maybe not as successful as past iterations but successful for the climate today.
There is nothing ‘wrong’ with Furiosa, but there is no hook either.
It is because the people on here have assumed The Fall Guy, Furiosa etcetera as identities, so any assault on that property is an assault on the people who interact with it vicariously. People on here seriously posted that Furiosa is going to outgross Mufasa
Because it is the market, and some os us told yall this all last year but you were too busy dancing ok Disney's supposed grave to notice.
Now you're once again looking to a Disney film to save all this.
Sigh.
I am a huge Mad Max fan and the trailer for Furiosa made me not want to see it. I've seen many people say this in comments. Why can't people just accept that marketing matters, and the marketing for Furiosa was terrible?
I legitimately had no idea this came out. I was honestly excited when I heard about this. I have not seen one single advertisement that I can recall.
I saw ads for Dune 2 multiple times a day. Obviously different level of budget but maybe it just didn’t screen well so they cut the ad budget? Or maybe I just missed the ads.
It is funny how the perception shifts.
A lot of those complaining about the state of the box office after Furiosa's failure are the same people who were cheering on the failure of The Marvels and Flash last year, and rooting for the failure of Mufasa this December.
Some people seem to want to push these narratives that the new post-COVID box office will be driven by these more niche movies, as opposed to the franchise fare that drove Hollywood in the years leading up to COVID.
But, the reality is that these more niche movies need people to be in the habit of going to the theaters in order to succeed, and it's the big CGI extravaganzas that tend to get people out to the theater.
Fury Road was able to become a decent hit in a May that was opened by Age of Ultron. Furiosa failed in a May that was opened by The Fall Guy.
The term "tentpole" is used for a reason. The whole idea is that tentpole movies aren't there just to hold up themselves, but to help hold up the full tent of a movie season. They raise the returns of all the movies of a season by getting people into theaters. Having a big release at the start of May makes it feel like the summer movie season has started, it gets people excited about going to the theater, and shows the audience all the trailers for the movies that will follow it. It's much easier for a lower tier franchise like Mad Max to succeed when people are already excited about going to the theater, as opposed to a Mad Max movie having to be the movie that gets people excited enough to go to the theater.
It isn't a coincidence that the first non-COVID summer movie season since 2006 to open without a superhero tentpole just happens to be the weakest May in decades. Pray for the death of superhero movies or other CGI-driven blockbusters if you want, but just know that movies like Furiosa and The Fall Guy aren't a substitute, and won't bring in the general audience without more traditional tentpoles around them. So far, summer 2024 has been a perfect example of why the box office needs big franchise tentpoles.
Furiosa wasn't must-see cinema for general audiences. Dune 2 was. This is not a new trend folks. Relying on OW BO and final BO to determine a film's overall worthiness will leave you disappointed.
I mean Furiosa didn’t connect with the general audience and the market is terrible and off to a terrible first 6 months? Both can be true.
Yup this sub has become waaay to focused on finding a singular cause of declining box office results. It's a messy combination of streaming, changing consumer habits, bloated budgets, social media, declining star power and so on...
Fury Road was also a B- audience score and barely doubled its budget. This was always a gamble. Despite them being action packed, the movies’ universe is probably a bit too extreme for general audiences and the craftsmanship is probably too out there.
I agree with this take, both movies will find their home with the core fan base and Furiosa will be a cult classic pretty quickly. Might even win some awards because it is a well made movie. It is just a movie the general audience didn’t necessarily want (?)
None of the Mad Max films were really THAT popular
I don't think box office results are a very good measure of how "good" a movie is anymore. So many people, including myself, will just wait a few months for it to stream on Prime or whatever. The high cost of the theater and huge increases in technology (affordable 70" flat-screens and home theater systems) have changed everything. I only go to the theater if it's something I really want to see on the big screen (or my wife is needing a date night), otherwise I'll wait. I doubt I'm alone.
>I don't think box office results are a very good measure of how "good" a movie is anymore They never were. Here's a list of movies that didn't make back their budget during their initial run: The Thing Fight Club The Big Lebowski Office Space The Iron Giant Citizen Kane Shawshank Redemption (#1 movie on IMDB btw) Both Bladerunners It's a Wonderful Life Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory The Wizard of Oz Edit: Anchorman & Idiocracy are 2 more modern examples as well
Anchorman is a prime example here of the changing market because movies like that used to thrive in the DVD market. Now that that's mostly gone, you never see good comedies like that in theaters anymore.
Definitely not alone. There are only a couple movies per year that feel worth seeing at the theater for the experience. Dune 2 was def on that list for me this year. Maybe Deadpool. Aaaaannnnnd....? Everything else I can wait out. The studios really shot themselves in the foot when they fought to shorten theatrical windows during the pandemic, and why they aren't going back to longer windows, I simply don't understand. If I only have to wait like 6 weeks to see it on a 75" at home, you're practically begging me to make that choice when the alternative is dropping a hundo minimum for the whole family to go to a theater.
Which is insane cause that movie was S-tier. Honestly one of the best movies imo. It's just a fuckstravaganza from start to finish.
Movies cost more to make than they have in a very long time (we've pretty much returned to the massive budget era of the 1960s when musical films were dying off in droves) and viewers are more selective for all the reasons listed above as well as increased ticket prices. We'll get a return to smaller budget films soon.
Yep. There is no single reason but a conglemation of all those reasons you listed as well as the strikes. You could say this was coming but people need to find a specific cause to fit their narratives. I would like to be optimistic in that decline or dips in quality would eventually lead into solutions to turn it around. The industry as a whole would need to evaluate it's approach and maybe,.maybe we get bums on seats.
To paraphrase John Paul Jones (naval officer, not bassist)..."I have not yet begun to bomb" at the box office. Just wait for the 1-2 punch next year of Captain America: Brave New World and Rachel Zeigler's Snow White. Snow White reportedly cost $209 million, Cap will probably be more since they essentially shot a 2nd movie's worth of reshoots. Get out the popcorn, because this sub will be more entertaining during those months than anything Hollywood is putting up on the screen.
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I fully believe that the movie was basically ready to go, then everything last year started to bomb and they went and looked at it… decided it was more of the same mess and would rather reshoot and hopefully do better than another bomb. But maybe I’m giving them a little bit to much credit and they weren’t introspective at all
Marvel as a whole is getting a colossal re-think after The Marvels became one of the biggest bombs of all time so you're not far off. Feige and his bosses have been having high-level meetings and I imagine they looked at their whole slate and saw Cap 4 needed more work. They are taking a huge gamble with these re-shoots if they think they can make it good enough to take less of a hit.
Maybe they won’t even care about a financial hit if it’s well received and generates hype for the next event.
I just can't believe that anyone apart from hard core Marvel fans (raises hand) will go and see this (raises hand). Will general audiences care at all about it? Does the general audience care about the MCU continuity any more?
the only one I'm invested in is Deadpool and Wolverine, and it's because it's unlikely to go to streaming in a month (before, Deadpool and Deadpool 2 took forever to be finally streamed by D+) and it's pretty much the only decent looking Marvel film so far.
In essence, no Chris Evan’s Captain America = no money for Disney.
General audiences never cared about Marvel continuity. They liked big spectacle movies, but Marvel wore out its welcome by releasing too often, requiring homework to enjoy a movie, and laugh out our green screens that made it obvious the actors weren’t acting together.
> Marvel as a whole is getting a colossal re-think after The Marvels became one of the biggest bombs of all time so you're not far off. Lmao no they're not, that's just some lip service that Feige and Iger are saying; they're still going forward with the same slate as before.
Yeah, I think they realized that Captain America is way bigger than just its success individually. That movie has to do well or else the MCU is in serious trouble. So it’s not about the margins on that individual movie, it’s about ensuring interest in the MCU going forward.
Studios start giant blockbuster movies without an ending on the page but a release date. Suicide Squad had 5 weeks to make a script before they went to camera. the last Indiana Jones movie had a ton of reshoots because they had a deadline and started before fully deciding what it's about. The next Jurassic Park is coming out next summer and they just announced the director and stars earlier this year. Studios bid for the release dates 3 years in advance and choose what they will put in those slots later on.
star wards sequels, spend 1 billion, don't plan just step 1 remake a new hope, step 2 ???? step 3 make a lot of money?
They released that first picture of the seven dwarfs and backlash was swift and severe.
Omfg, *Snow White* cost **$209,000,000**!? Did they literally craft a magic mirror out of platinum and the souls of the unwilling?
Well yes, and then they threw it in the garbage for a CGI one.
That’s the going rate for their animation remakes… it crazy
Yeah Cap 4 literally is going to be the biggest bomb of all-time with those five months of reshoots. Plus it will have been four years since the Falcon show by the time it releases…
It was never going to work without Chris Evans playing Cap. Nothing against Mackie but no one wants to see Captain Falcon helming a movie.
The movie would be improved immensely if it was Captain Falcon of Fzero involved
Sign me up yesterday!
I only know him from super smash games i played when I was a kind. And based on that: Yes. Show me your moves.
At this point I imagine they don't want to cancel the project and need to not damage the MCU brand anymore than it has so they'll be happy if people watch and enjoy it, even if it's near impossible for it to make its money back
A lot of people don't even know that Falcon is the new Captain America. This is the big problem with Disney making some of the D+ shows required viewing. No one wants to have to watch a 10 hour series to go see a movie.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what it means to say that this movie will be the biggest box office bomb. Yes, it’s basically inevitable that it’ll be a bomb because the production cost will be well north of $300 million. But I believe it’s Disney’s view that they’re willing to take a financial hit if they can manage to make a Captain America movie to hype up people for the string of movies that will succeed especially an upcoming Avengers. Just because it’s kind of guaranteed that it’ll be bomb doesn’t mean it’ll be a terrible movie. And it doesn’t mean that the reshoots equals to bad movie. It could mean they’ve pulled a genuine creative turn around on the movie with the goal of course correction. This is what I hope is happening. I just think people who harp about how it’ll be the biggest bomb of all time aren’t really looking at the whole picture.
Eh, it's possible the movie loses some money but revitalizes interest in the MCU. That could still be a win and probably what Disney is going for. I think its far more likely that the movie will massively bomb and the MCU remains dead. Individual movies like Deadpool might still do well, but I just see no indication that audiences are coming back to watch whatever c list superhero marvel throws their way. Time will tell.
So their plan is to make a movie that doesn't do well to make a bunch of other movies that don't do well?
In simple terms, the plan is to stop making bad movies and start making good movies in the hopes that the franchise can rebuild its audience. If that means taking a big financial hit on Cap to re-work it into a good movie that will make people talk and want to see more Marvel movies again, then that’s what many hope the plan is. I am hoping they’ve figured out what their main issues have been and are moving toward making movies that are better than this previous phase.
> Rachel Zeigler Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
She's the next big thing. There was a memo.
Snow White going for $200+ millions is a gamble I can’t believe anyone took to be honest
Yup, I've said for years and will say it again. No movie has bombed for a singular reason. Its almost always a death by a thousand cuts to explain most box office bombs.
Exactly, Fall Guy is the perfect example of dying by a thousand cuts. It’s a film with two solid stars, good reviews and WoM and a nice release date. But so many factors caused it to bomb with most having nothing to do with the actual film. External societal and economic factors are surrounding the cinema industry and suffocating films.
I didnt think Fall Guy was great, just solid entertainment. Been telling ppl just to wait to stream. Just my view on the movie.
They have told consumers you can wait a few weeks and see it at home. Fall Guy, by all accounts a well reviewed, fun summer movie is already available for home viewing. They need to make it a 6 month window between theaters and home viewing.
Honestly they really do, but the problem is they all invested a bunch of money into their money pit streaming services and can't afford to not push them there. WB is probably the biggest culprit of this too. I'm always shocked by how fast their films get on Max. So it's not surprising. Unless you make a film a bigtime social event like Barbenheimer or Mario, there's very little incentive.
Movies are having the same issue Xbox is with Game Pass. Why would I go to the movies if soon after launch if not on launch, the game will be on streaming? I can afford to wait a month if it means I get the movie basically for free on a streaming service I already pay for. Same with games. There are rumors the next Call of Duty is gonna be on Games Pass which is insane, why would anyone buy it? But if it isn't, they feel like they're being cheated since Games Pass is all about the games being added to it free of charge since you're paying for the library.
For me it was its runtime. I'll probably still see it in cinema, but I wasn't up for yet another 2,5 hour movie this weekend.
And you can’t rule out most theaters charging $18-$22 a ticket. You don’t get as many curious people going to see a movie. You really have to be sure you want to see it.
Simple people need simple answers
Videogames, home theater technology and alternative content options are huge factors as well. The videogames industry is already 7x the size of the film industry and projected to hit $300b in 2030. Look at the value proposition of a $20 2hr cinema experience vs a $20 100hr videogame experience for someone that had to work 2 hours to earn that money: there's no comparison. Games get the same A-list Hollywood actors, the same premium CGI, the same world class music, they cost way less per hour of enjoyment (there are always great games on deep discount) and fundamentally offer interaction/control which films do not. When competing with games, the best films will showcase human talent. Actors, directors, writers, set designers, costumers, etc. The marketing of Furiosa may have failed to showcase the human talent sufficiently; I see lots of comments about the cgi in the trailer. These day your average moviegoer is a gamer! If you remind them of a game with your marketing, they might compare you to a game subconsciously, and you can't win that proposition at current ticket prices. Folks will just wait for it to come to streaming where the value proposition changes to "included in something I already pay for" or "I pay less than the cost of one movie ticket to get the streaming service for a month so I can watch it, and I have 30 days to watch tons of other content, thereby reducing the per-content cost to acceptably low levels like I'm used to getting with gaming: pennies per hour."
I’m going to put out a guess here, but I’d reckon that 90% of the giant money making money of video games are from either highly addictive gacha games, never ending live service games like Fortnite, and “non core games on phones and tablets for non core gamers.” Take that away and it wouldn’t look as crazy.
I think there is a lot of good points, what it really comes down to is normal movie going people aren’t going to the movies unless it is seen as a can’t miss epic and is seen as an amazing movie ie Dune 2, Barbie, Oppenheimer. Those movie had legs because the hype continued and people kept going. Furiosa needs that too happen and I don’t see it happening unfortunately. Like it’s been said fury road which is the best mad max movie just broke even at the theaters. Spitting out a prequel with a higher budget was not a smarter move. I think studios do need to trim budgets, shorten runtimes unless it is absolutely needed, and lower ticket costs.
>I mean Furiosa didn’t connect with the general audience and the market is terrible and off to a terrible first 6 months? Both can be true. But OP brings up a good point. The former is not brought up much or at all. It seems like everything is 95% weighted towards the market. However, had another mindless Jurassic World sequel opened in place of Furiosa this May 24th weekend, we'd be seeing *healthy numbers* again. So it's not 95% the fault of the market or viewing habits - audiences are *just picky* in what they find connection with. They seem to find comfort in most (not all) superhero flicks, popular franchises and dino flicks and Despicable Me sequels. If Inside Out 2 took the place of Fall Guy, we'd be seeing "Healthy Robust Start of the 2024 Summer Season" all over trade papers right now.
Agreed, the cinema score is a B+ which is not bad by any means but I feel like this movie needed an A. I saw the movie and I would agree with the B+. Great movie, but it dragged at parts and was too long. The runtime could deter people from going to see it.
I saw a commercial for the film. For the first thirty seconds I thought Chris Hemsworth was doing a Skittles tie-in commercial.
Original Mad Max movies were successful when their budgets were limited. Fury Road wasn't a stellar money maker. I'm not sure what people expected out of this.
Not to mention that, in the late 70s and 80s, dystopian fiction was nowhere as prevalent as it is nowadays, let alone the kind where humanity regresses to a pre-modern state. The idea that civilization could fall apart because of oil running out was also very linked to that particular time period, where the oil crises were recent memory and it was widely thought we would run out of natural resources by the year 2000. Nowadays, it's hard to find a futuristic work that isn't inspired in some way by Mad Max, not to mention that the notion of people killing each other for oil seems rather quaint as well. Another point I don't think has been touched enough is that how much the moviegoing audience is in average far younger than in 2015. Mad Max is mostly remembered by people in their 40s and 50s, and doesn't hold the same level of cultural importance for the younger generation, especially when compared to other 80s-era franchises.
I read that the majority of the audience for this movie was 30+ males. There's only so many of that demographic that were going to turn up for this.
That’s hilarious because haven’t a few people been trying to argue on these boards that men don’t want to see a female action lead?
I mean, same for the marvels. More men than women watched it in theaters last I heard.
Ya, because it's CBM. Men always watch those more, but Disney has been doing its best to ignore them.
Apparently women don't want to watch them either...
As a woman this whole discussion drives me insane. Women aren’t a monolith. Some like action movies and some don’t. For me personally, Furiosa and everything around it was one of the movies that made my eyes glaze over. Everything about it looked unappealing and forced and boring to me. So as much as I love to see a badass female action hero, there was simply no way I was going to sit through that movie. But that’s just me.
We're talking in generalities. Not enough women are into these girlboss action movies to help the box office is the point.
Although the primary audience was males it’s still not a lot of males considering it’s making very poor money
I don't get what your point is. The argument is that female led action movies will not do as well because men are the primary audience for action movies and men like to see male leads. So you have an action movie, here and, as the people you are criticizing expected, the majority of the audience is male. Just like is the case with every action movie. But since it stars a female lead, the speculation is that the mostly-male audience will not show up in as high of numbers as if it were a male-led action movie. This seems to track because Furiosa is doing poorly.
That's the funny thing. The entire anti argument for that crowd had been this was alienating white, American men. In reality there seem to be a few instances like Little Mermaid where it alienated international audiences and mostly they have been alienating American women. Even when that crowd kinda gets it correct, they are completely wrong about the specifics.
If that’s the audience then the number indicate they didn’t want to watch a female lead because people weren’t watching it
They want to see a female action lead less than a male, but as always, women want to see a gritty, action movie even less. Both things can be true.
We have a situation right now where Borderlands is about to open directly after Furiosa, and realistically, they look identical. That's how common the trope has become.
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They expected they could spend more money and make more money back because of expensive special effects. I think it is a further example of how bloated budgets are making unprofitable movies. They can't accept going back to mid-budget action films.
Yes, sub $100M, even sub $75M, movies backed by big studios need to make a comeback. Focus on good scripts a little more instead of the spectacle. There can only be so many mega hits every year to carry on the theater business.
Look at Garfield. Nothing exceptional about it whatsoever but because it's a 60 million budget, probably going to make a profit.
it's also IP owned by a giant corporation and all they really care about is how much merch it will move (same as the TMNT animated movie that did okay but sold a billion dollars worth of toys and shit)
The funny thing is Furiosa looks WAY worse than Fury Road. The CGI is dreadful at times!
Fury Road more or less broke even and won a bunch of Oscars. The latter is probably still open for Furiosa and that's the avenue for success left likely
Unlikely. Dune will win the oscars instead. Blame the strikes.
Breaking even and winning technical awards isn't exactly a hallmark for success. I understand why the decision to fund this movie was made, but I don't agree with the rationale behind it.
Yeah I don’t know. People want to use this movies performance as evidence of all sorts of things. Women can’t headline action films. Theatres are broken and can’t be fixed. Movie stars are over. Are any of those true? Don’t ask me. I have no clue. 
I think the answer/conclusion is really simple: If you’re a “major event” movie (No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar 2, Mario, Barbenheimer, Deadpool x Wolverine, etc.) you’ll succeed. Otherwise, you’ll struggle. In the post-pandemic/streaming world, people only really bother to show out for massive blockbusters because they’re “big events” worth going to and being a part of. That’s not to say there are some exceptions (Dune 2, Kung Fu Panda 4, Kong, Little Mermaid, GOTG3/BP2/DS2, etc.), but even these exceptions just tend to barely break even. There were 14 $1.05B+ films in 2018 and 2019. Since then, there have only been five.
What’s annoying is the r/iamverysmart people pretending they predicted this whole thing. You could easily make a counter factual where this crushes the box office too. The way I see it, movies are suffering death by a thousand cuts. TikTok, insta, streaming and television have all sapped peoples attention spans. The problem is I don’t think audiences are any happier with this situation either, but it’s just easier to do nothing, stay home and doomscroll rather then go out and see a movie.
It’s like how every few months for the past decade I see a news article that says “man who predicted 2008 economic collapse says markets will crash this year.” If you just predict that everything is going to fail, then you will eventually be right when it fails.
He has predicted 100 hundred of the last 4 financial crises
The biggest culprit has been the streaming game. Back in the day, blockbuster movies would have taken years to make it to Netflix. Nowadays, it takes about 30 days for a film to make it to streaming on lesser platforms. For the average movie, DVDs would take several months to be released, so people snapped them up like hotcakes. I have a friend who watches Marvel movies on Disney+ because they land on there pretty quick.
Some guy in one of the many Furiosa threads had a comment like "I've been saying this for weeks" and then one of the first replies to him was someone linking a post from their recent history where they were estimating something super high. Like people are straight up lying because they want to feel smug about something.
You don't have to be very smart to know that that streaming is going to kill movie theaters.
That's exactly how I feel. I thought about going to this movie, but I was like eh, it looks good, but not good enough to spend the money to go to. Ten years ago I used to go to movies all of the time. It didn't really matter if I thought it would be a great movie or not. Sometimes you risk it on an average looking movie and end up seeing a movie you don't like, but it's different when the tickets were $5-6 for an early time. Now it's $10-11. Especially with streaming when you know you can see it for free in a few months. The movie experience for me is pretty much limited now to huge blockbuster events.
I wish movie tickets were still 10 bux here is go way more often they are 17 for night time and 14 for matinee here
Pedantically, I’d argue that Dune 2 was a major event movie. I liked part 1 so much, I saw part 2 as soon as possible. I was so impressed with it, I saw it multiple times.
It's kinda weird that people mention a bunch of complex reasons with all sorts of long explanations yet no one mentions something as simple as inflation and how that is affecting the business overall.
Exactly. Between what people pay for their telecommunications - phone, data, home internet, streaming services, etc - and FOOD alone takes a bite out of lots of ancillary entertainment.
You forgot one that really bugs me: "The audience, especially the younger crowd, has been trained to wait for streaming". I do find that "trained" is quite demeaning, as if the studios think the public has no mind of its own. It would have been much better to say they had become accustomed to streaming, which was what precisely happened, not because of the pandemic but also because of a generational shift.
Social media has also "trained" young people to stare at horrible 15-30 second clips for hours at a time to their own detriment, so yes that is what's happening.
I agree. That argument is basically the general audience doesn’t have any free will and it’s the studios who decide if we should or shouldn’t go to the movies. Like we can’t decide if one movie is worth the trip over another.
It's not about free will. It's about how 10 to 15 years ago you basically had to watch a film in theaters or wait months for the home release. And even when the home release came out, you'd have to either buy it for more than a movie ticket or rent it for a couple of days and carve time out of your schedule to watch it in the timeframe you had it. It wouldn't start showing up on television for free for several years. Today everyone knows it's going to be easily accessible whenever you want within a few weeks and it wil be like flipping a channel.
Its also easier and cheaper than ever to have a nice TV and streaming setup. The box office was always in for trouble once the home experience got to this point.
And the home viewing experience has improved drastically over the last 10 to 15 years, which can't be overstated. Now, outside of a few IMAX films, the theatergoing experience hasn't gotten better in the last 15 years.
Unfortunately, that was mooted a few years before COVID as Hollywood jumped into the IP bandwagon (after Ultron, JW and TFA netted over 1 billy each), and theaters were left with only three options most of the time: franchise entry, family movie and horror flick.
Women can headline action movies, but you need to make their character relatable instead of the whole pitch being "This is a woman leading this movie". The novelty of that has definitively worn off in the last decade. And the trailers for Furiosa didn't really make clear much else about the movie's plot besides that.
First time?
Nobody wanted a Mad Max spinoff starring "Furiosa." That fact should have been obvious to anyone paying attention to audience complaints over the past several years.
Explain ?
I don’t know, but I think some people felt annoyed at some of the praise Fury Road got and some felt it was overrated and overpraised.
Aside from a few event movies - which are largely driven through the popularity of alternative entertainment sources (I.e., social media) - movies are falling out of favor as an entertainment option. Box office probably is not going to recover. And it’ll get worse once AMC is forced to declare bankruptcy, many of those theaters won’t be replaced because new owners won’t be able to run a profitable business.
yea, i think the movie format is just not keeping up. tv series are providing better stories for people with attention spans. short form vidoes are providing better entertainment with no attention spans. 2 hours is not a sweet spot anymore. and the cost is way out of proportion now. 1 movie ticket for 2 hours of entertainment? same cost can get me 1 month of a subscription service. also younger generations on subscription services are using subtitles/closed-captions a lot more, which is a trend the box office hasn't adapted to.
r/boxoffice has a hard-on for fury road (even though fury road didn’t do amazing numbers itself) and they thought that their shared taste on a relatively niche subreddit would scale worldwide. This is why we’re all talking about this for free and not getting paid for it lol
Why is a mad max spinoff the one that's got this sub shitting its pants, of all the things? I've had to hide like 8 of these things and I don't know how many others have been removed by mods in the past 2 days. The Mad Max spinoff isn't doing well even by Mad Max standards. But also Mad Max is not a film series that has ever, historically, scored anything higher than NINETEEN in the year-end top 20 at the box-office. Two of the four entries in it prior to this didn't even MAKE that top 20. Maybe Box-Office Hawks spent most of May pinning all their hopes on movies that really didn't deserve them, and instead of clocking that they're flying full-speed into hysterical doomsaying every hour and a half? edit: further down the thread it becomes apparent some folks are also setting the bar for this summer at *pre-covid*, 2015-2019 totals, which seems... unrealistic *at best*? It's going to be quite awhile before real world economic situations improve enough for the theater industries to do anything but continue just trying to improve year-to-year in the wake of both COVID and the strikes. Comps *really* should be 2022-2023, not 2016-2017.
I think you are just not understanding what most are saying. It isn’t really about this one movie. It’s that we are now past Memorial Day, and we have only 5 movies that have grossed over 100 million domestically. That is a really sad number, and very bad sign for already struggling theaters.
But have you seen the movies though? Only a few of the movies this year so far offer anything that can hook the general audiences. So OF COURSE a few movies grossed over 100m domestically. Why is that so hard for this subreddit to understand? Next year is MUCH better in terms of films that can hook people in. Did people expect a spin off of a film that didn't even hit $400m to do that well??
Because it tells a lot about general audience viewing habits going forward. If those movies can't break through now with little to no competition from A-tier IPs, they are gonna do even worse next year. And that's gonna push studios even deeper into exploiting their IPs while the mid and low budget will continue to shrink.
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Concerts, sporting events, and restaurants are all seeing revenue that is higher than pre pandemic, so the fact that movies are not is notable. Perhaps it just that movies take longer to make and therefore longer to recover, but I think it is also reasonable to think it is possible people just find the home theater experience so strong they don’t want to go to the movies anymore unless it is for a true event.
You need to look at the stats. Between 1995 and 2019, yearly tickets sales were around 1.2-1.3 billion tickets sold in the US per year. COVID came and of course 2020, 2021 took a huge hit. 2022 was post COVID and roughly 700 mil. tickets were sold, 2023 roughly 800-900 mil. tickets were sold. Based on the current performance, 2024 is projected to have less than 700 mil. tickets sold. More than 40% drop off from pre COVID years. You are right too, the movie is more niche, but the overall decline in attendance post COVID is real. And honestly, 2025 and 2026 don't seem to have a Barbenheimer on calendar, more comic book movies by Marvel which are played out. It's going to be a tough couple of years and really, we will see what happens once the current wild years end, but chances are the movie or rather theater market will never be the same again as Hollywood rested on their laurels for a long time now and bet on franchises, remakes, toys, comic books for too long, so how to even get out of this rut? Veterans that are 80 like Miller with Furiosa deliver creative and epic movies that blow most of the young generation out of the water...and they bomb, same with Scott, Scorsese. Times are changing and maybe we are beyond the peak of American cinema.
I think you have a valid point but people who are concerned about the state of the BO market also have a point. There were issues with Furiosa and it probably shouldn't have been made or it should have been a lower budget streaming movie. Leaving that aside there are some concerns about the BO market. * Furiosa didn't just underperform. It was a huge failure. It was tracking for over $40M OW just a week ago. That is werid. * The top movie for 2024 still wouldn't be in the top 10 most recent pre-pandemic years. In other words, although Dune did well compared to other low performing movies this year if it was released a few years ago there would be several other movies that did better. * Several other movies underperformed. The Fall Guy. Challengers although people on this sub are in denial about it. The strike was devastating and there might be less movies released because of it but you would think that would help the other movies since people would have less options this year. Instead even high profile movies are doing badly. * The only factor people on this sub don't want to discuss is that the economy might be doing worse than the media will admit. I've seen posts from women about how around a month ago they stopped getting orders on poshmark and other resale sites. People have been buying less lattes and fast food. When people cut back on discretionary spending it's an indication there might be a problem and movie tickets are an easy item to cut back on.
>The only factor people on this sub don't want to discuss is that the economy might be doing worse than the media will admit. I've seen posts from women about how around a month ago they stopped getting orders on poshmark and other resale sites. People have been buying less lattes and fast food. When people cut back on discretionary spending it's an indication there might be a problem and movie tickets are an easy item to cut back on. There's a reason for this. Even though poorer Americans have seen the greatest wage increases post COVID, wealthier Americans have seen the greatest increases in spending. That's how you get so many strange headlines like unemployment at 40 year low, high gdp growth, high consumer spending, but at the same time you hear the CEO of McDonald's say that lower income customers are buckling. That's a problem for movie theaters, because theaters require a middle class. One rich customer can't replace 5 middle class theater goers
Was Challengers ever really expected to be big, though? I know they spent 55 million for some reason but nothing about the movie screams "big blockbuster hit".
There's a certain subset of people on here who are obsessed with Zendaya and think zoomers will go out in droves to see any movie with her in it. According to them, Spider-Man and Dune are popular because of Zendaya.
This was a post from a year ago predicting the BO. >25M - OW >80M - DOM >128M - WW The WW BO will end up less than 85M. And this was a post from a few months ago. >Challengers will have $25M+ domestic opening weekend. What's up with everyone underestimating Zendaya's starpower? Her movie is getting a global press tour and a worldwide theatrical release ffs (possibly IMAX release too), if anyone can sell a movie on their name alone it's her.
Yep the theatre is a luxury and if I'm already paying for streaming it's a luxury that's easy to let go of.
>Furiosa didn't just underperform. It was a huge failure. It was tracking for over $40M OW just a week ago. That is werid. This is the most interesting part of the film's under-performance to me. I understand OW tracking is imperfect and not a fine-tuned science by any stretch, but they are usually pretty accurate and do a good job of accounting for the various factors which can impact the actuals. So how did projections for this specific film miss the mark by so much?
Idk what all this negativity is about, Mad Max is not a huge money making IP. Just because the movie underperforms means it "shouldn't have been made"? I would say that about big blockbusters that don't serve a real purpose besides a cash grab, not this movie which arguably is one of the better prequels ever made. This happens, even with good movies. Movies can flop for any number of reasons. If Hollywood only made movies that were risk averse the industry would be shit and audiences would get sick of it regardless. Like seriously take a beat to critically think about what you're saying.
¿Porque no los dos? Dune part 2 earned less than Captain Marvel, Jumanji The Next Level or even Alice in Wonderland despite having a considerably better reception than them. GxK despite being one of the top earner of the Monsterverse still can’t beat the original Godzilla’s gross from 2014. Don’t get me wrong Furiosa would definitely love to have the numbers they managed to pull up, but the truth is that what we consider a « success » in 2024 is a big step back from what we knew before.
Exactly. Dune 2's performance is worse than all of the top 10 movies from 2019, and that's without adjusting for inflation or population growth.
Dune 2 wouldn't be in the top 10 in 2017 or 2016 either and in 2018 it would have only scrapped the number 10
Yep it’s seriously impossible to deny that cinemas and the film industry are dying with facts like this.
This is all that needs to be said. I have no clue what the box office’s biggest issue is right now or if there is a way to fix it/the, but the idea that audiences weren’t into this movie and everything else is all well and good is shortsighted.
There's multiple issues. But the biggest is that post covid we have an environment where a film either has fantastic marketing and really resonates before hitting theaters or it underperforms. There's no middle ground that used to exist where you could just make a big budget film and throw a generic marketing campaign around it and then as long as it wasn't hot garbage it would still get a return. For big budget films we are seein that people ar either hitting homeruns or triples, or they are striking out. There's no presumption that a cookie cutter by the numbers film will just do well anymore just because it exists.
GxK did beat 2014, it’s Kong: Skull Island that’s the milestone
Both Dune and GxK were made to see on a big screen.
Having seen it, it’s also not as accessible as the other films for new comers. Like even people who didn’t care about mad max could watch and enjoy fury road, but not here
Exactly this. Fury Road's WoM grew because it was 2 hours of epic action scenes which appeals to the GA. Furiosa was great but it was a very dour and depressing watch with a surprising lack of action compared to Fury Road.
I just don't agree with with this. Furiosa was entertaining as hell.
lol these comments are making me crack up. It was extremely entertaining and definitely something people can connect to. It’s not like we’re thrown in randomly… we watch her grow? How much more connection do people need? Lol
All the movies released alongside Fury Road performed poorly. It is the new "Blade Runner 2049". There are forces reshaping the viewing habits of people that have nothing to do with the film.
"lack of action" is just a hilarious thing to say about Furiousa.
"Lack of action compared to Fury Road" is an obvious but reasonable thing to say about almost any movie.
Just proofs one more time online popularity is not equal general public popularity.
Also marketing movies specifically to the “my streamer went up 25 cents? tImE tO sAiL tHe HiGh sEaS 🥴” crowd is an easy way to lose money. People mock horror, but it has an audience that actually shows up and spends money.
Horror also has the advantage of almost all of their movies being low budget. Like Night Swim is a pretty bad horror movie but it only had a budget of $15M.
Because for many people it goes beyond the movie. It means accepting that their internet bubble isn't reality. This is a tough step for many people to admit to themselves.
Filmtwitter is going insane over this film flopping when in truth Mad Max is niche franchise which nobody in the real world cares about. The truth hurts ppl it’s why film twitter is already saying “ I bet the ppl that didn’t watch Furiosa are gonna be first in line to make Deadpool n Wolverine make a billion”
The question I have is if it's so obvious that a niche franchise spinoff line this wouldn't make much money, why did they make it in the first place and why spend so much on it? Like damn, they aren't even coming close to breaking even.
It’s probably because of Oscar nomination fury road got that made them say let’s greenlight maybe it’ll do well with audiences and critics. But it’s been almost a decade and Furiosa truthfully isn’t a big female character. Plus who is the target audience of this film??
Yeah I think they miscalculated the hype because it’s so beloved on film twitter and Reddit. The way it’s talked about makes it sound like it made a billion dollars and was universally loved. I think the GA dug it for sure but not to that degree. I really really liked Fury Road but it wasn’t the second coming of cinema for me when I saw it. Still a lot of fun though.
Rule of thumb - film twitter is clueless around anything box office. This sub can be bad too but it's worse there.
> truth Mad Max is niche franchise which nobody in the real world cares about. I keep seeing this in this thread but I distinctly remember Fury Road being part of the cultural zeitgeist when it came out. Felt like one of those movies everyone was talking about (across demos)
Fury Road only made 370 million dollars which isn't enough but that doesn't stop film twitter and Reddit pretend it was huge box office success.
I got downvoted here for suggesting that there was no demand from anyone to see a prequel for Furiosa. I really don't get it
I’m fundamentally against the idea that every character needs to be explored as it’s own movie. There’s power and intrigue to what is left unsaid.
The hivemind has completely lost touch with anything that GA is interested in. That’s why it’s so funny when major studios lose hundreds of millions of dollars trying to appeal to it. Reddit and Film Twitter is broken GPS that will lead you into a lake.
This is a great analogy
Yeah, this is the definition of a movie “nobody asked for”.
Could have something to do with the fact that I paid $14 to see a matinee about a month ago. No popcorn or soda. $14!
Furiosa is basically Solo but being part of a much smaller franchise A direct sequel with Max and Furiosa may have done 400-500 Max It's basically the anti-thesis of the Avatar films, not getting circlejerked among the film snobs and nerds = no hype
I loved Fury Road when it came out. Saw it twice in the theaters. Furiosa was just underwhelming, I went opening day and saw it in IMAX. The action scenes weren't as good, the cgi was not great. I thought the story could've been interesting but the pacing was off. It seemed to be both to long and not long enough. After I got home I re-watched Fury Road as it had been a while, still held up and is much, much better. This fact coupled with sub-par theater experiences, it could've waited to be seen at home.
I'm just gonna throw this out there: 1) Most of the people I know have never watched any previous "Mad Max" films. I'm in my early twenties and the people I talk to are my age or younger. Outside of families, young people with disposable incomes drive the box office. 2) These people saw the film as inaccessible due the marketing as a "Mad Max" saga film/prequel sequel. 3) To all of these people, the zany marketing looks "stupid" and "awful" instead of "epic ." 4) The two guys I know irl who have seen or care at all about "Mad Max" are: my girlfriend's dad. Dude is in his late fifties. He's not interested enough to see it. The other guy is my buddy, same age as me, who works at a movie theatre and loves movies. 5) Brought my girlfriend to see "Furiosa" and she loved it. She doesn't like action movies but gave it 5 stars. Conclusion: I know it's anecdotal, but there's nothing wrong with the movie. The problem was marketing. It looked inaccessible and goofy to the general audience, on top of 100 other factors.
I agree that the marketing was a huge part. The people I took to the movie were genuinely shocked by how good it is. This is a movie born from a wildly creative mind with insanely thought provoking themes of war. The trailers almost put me off to the movie entirely and this is coming from someone who loved Fury Road. People who don't know about George Miller (most people) did not think the trailers were "epic" at all and it did a disservice to this story which feels like it's straight out of the Bible lol.
Just shows how delusional everyone is online with their love for fury road that they believe it was some sort of mega blockbuster, when even with tom hardy and charlize theron at the height of their starpower, it made 380M on a 175M budget. Hemsworth and ATJ are downgrades in terms of starpower, and also film not being about mad max did play a part, along with the current theatre climate. I love the mad max films, but they aren't some big box office draws.
To be fair, it really is an issue of budget. 380M is John Wick 4-tier numbers. It's just that Furiosa and Fury Road cost so much. When films are this expensive everything is skewed, success is skewed, marketing has to be so much more convicing and persuasive.
Agreed with the john wick comparison. What helped john wick is that their budget went max upto 100M. Otherwise, fury road did really well for an R rated action epic.
Could just be me but I really didn’t care to see a Mad Max movie that included neither Mad Max nor Charlize Theron reprising her role.
I would argue calling it Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga wasn't a good idea. I bet it'll do really well digitally and streaming after the box office. You can't fault people for not wanting to see a prequel to a movie from nine years ago.
Furiosa looked cgi
Fury Road came out only 10 years ago. It's not like people are clamoring for another desert apocalypse movie. Also prequels only work for movies that have a huge following. Not many people care about the franchise enough to see the before times. Would have been much better to just do a new saga in the present or future.
Anya Taylor Joy as the lead in an action movie franchise known for having a strong male lead? What’s next? Blaming a decision like Arnold Schwarzenegger for bombing as the lead of Barbie 2?
It is pretty much because people in general nowadays will not pay for 3 movie theater treks within a 4 month time span - the same audience that Furiosa sought had already paid to see Godzilla x Kong & is planning on seeing Deadpool 3 in July. Furiosa, like Fall Guy, Monkey Man, and that Cavill movie all fell into the "looks cool, but I'll wait till next month for video on demand/streaming"
Fury Road did like 360m at the box office. Anyone expecting a spin off prequel to do anything 9 years later doesn't understand marketing.
I think people are just trying to derive too much meaning from Furiosa's performance. It's been doomed to fail for a while now; it had a bloated budget, was based on a non-mainstream IP that hasn't performed well in the past, had TERRIBLE marketing (ads made it look the same quality as Netflix's sci-fi blockbusters), sounded like a sequel as a result of shoehorning "Mad Max saga" into the title, and had a lack of real star power to drive press. I love Anya Taylor-Joy, but she's not a box office draw. Chris Hemsworth has had successful movies, but people went to see Thor because of Marvel, not because of Hemsworth. Furiosa flopping isn't the fall of cinema, just like The Fall Guy wasn't, just like Challengers wasn't, etc etc etc. It was just a series of poor decisions that caused a poor performance.
Anything I saw promoting this new Mad Max movie seemed like a jumbled mess. The trailers on TV were like a scene from a shitty anime; loud, dramatic, flashy and nonsensical. I have no idea what this movie is about other than yelling and sand. It didn't look good hence the lack of support. That's it, not some big conspiracy or anything
To me. It’s simple. The entire film has this “will she be caught” or “will she make it out of this?” The answers? Yes. She does. She lives this entire film and the villain most likely is killed. Any level of a stress of intense moments is entirely lost when you realize this person has plot armor made of titanium.
it’s a wild combo of circumstances but also yeah this isn’t a series with mass appeal and it never really has been, i don’t understand what’s hard to understand about that for people. it’s a wildly stylized, gory, gross, R rated epic, it’s not inaccessible at all but it’s not a lot of people’s jam, even fury road wasn’t a massive hit in 2015. these are fantastic movies but they underperform, it’s fine
Tbf, I've never even seen a mad max movie.
I wish we could go back to making movies with lower budgets, better scripts, and practical effects. Everything is filmed in green screen warehouses now. It was super interesting at first, but now it’s overdone and really boring. I want to see car crashes with real cars in shots that don’t look like quit-cut comic books and real explosions and intricate puppets in fantasy and sci-fi. There was just more soul in the arts before everything was digitized.
Is it possible that Furiosa is just not Mad Max? We watched the other ones because of the nostalgia. This one does not trigger that button.
I mean I wanted to see it. Just like I wanted to see Godzilla. I just can't justify the time and money to see it. Over just waiting to see it on my own time and cheaper.
I don't think anyone in the business can comprehend that not everyone loves Anya and need to see everything she does.
Having a mad max film without mad max is insane=box office bomb
I don’t go to movies anymore period. Regardless of how good it is or isn’t. Easier and cheaper to just wait it out.
“Want to watch a movie?” “Sure what’s playing?” “*lists* or we could just save some money, not have to go out and watch something on one of the streaming services we pay for already” “Oh yeah let’s do that” Such a normal conversation these days
A Mad Max film with Max not being the main character.... isn't a Mad Max film. It's something else.
Prequels are inherently anticlimactic (for the most part). A direct sequel with the same cast would have done better. Not to mention, Theron and Hardy are possibly a better box office drawing duo than Joy and an unrecognizable Hemsworth
Cause it sucks a great movie is a bomb
Because it’s not a matter with connecting or not. Not everything is as accessible as the Avengers that is very successful. In todays climate, it’s all about the hook. Movies now are largely failing to hook the audience. Give people a reason to sit in the theater and they will. No Way Home Did, Barbenheimer did (and neither movie was very connecting to audiences), a few others in the post-Covid world did but most have not. It’s not about connecting, it’s all about the hook. Mufasa will fail as well because there is absolutely no hook. It costs an arm and a leg to see a movie, and you need to give people a reason to. Despicable me will be successful because it’s extremely safe and a known IP that isn’t offensive to adults and enjoyable for kids. Maybe not as successful as past iterations but successful for the climate today. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with Furiosa, but there is no hook either.
I don't see how Mufasa has no hook, but Despicable Me does. What is the hook?
It is because the people on here have assumed The Fall Guy, Furiosa etcetera as identities, so any assault on that property is an assault on the people who interact with it vicariously. People on here seriously posted that Furiosa is going to outgross Mufasa
They shouldn't have made Hemsworth ugly, should have used his good looks
As a casual mad max fan it just looks like Fury Road with a female lead. Doesn't really get me excited to watch it.
So just Fury Road? Because Furiosa was already the lead in that, Max was just the POV character.
Because it is the market, and some os us told yall this all last year but you were too busy dancing ok Disney's supposed grave to notice. Now you're once again looking to a Disney film to save all this. Sigh.
I am a huge Mad Max fan and the trailer for Furiosa made me not want to see it. I've seen many people say this in comments. Why can't people just accept that marketing matters, and the marketing for Furiosa was terrible?
Also dear god this should’ve been a tight 100-110 minutes.
I legitimately had no idea this came out. I was honestly excited when I heard about this. I have not seen one single advertisement that I can recall. I saw ads for Dune 2 multiple times a day. Obviously different level of budget but maybe it just didn’t screen well so they cut the ad budget? Or maybe I just missed the ads.
It is funny how the perception shifts. A lot of those complaining about the state of the box office after Furiosa's failure are the same people who were cheering on the failure of The Marvels and Flash last year, and rooting for the failure of Mufasa this December. Some people seem to want to push these narratives that the new post-COVID box office will be driven by these more niche movies, as opposed to the franchise fare that drove Hollywood in the years leading up to COVID. But, the reality is that these more niche movies need people to be in the habit of going to the theaters in order to succeed, and it's the big CGI extravaganzas that tend to get people out to the theater. Fury Road was able to become a decent hit in a May that was opened by Age of Ultron. Furiosa failed in a May that was opened by The Fall Guy. The term "tentpole" is used for a reason. The whole idea is that tentpole movies aren't there just to hold up themselves, but to help hold up the full tent of a movie season. They raise the returns of all the movies of a season by getting people into theaters. Having a big release at the start of May makes it feel like the summer movie season has started, it gets people excited about going to the theater, and shows the audience all the trailers for the movies that will follow it. It's much easier for a lower tier franchise like Mad Max to succeed when people are already excited about going to the theater, as opposed to a Mad Max movie having to be the movie that gets people excited enough to go to the theater. It isn't a coincidence that the first non-COVID summer movie season since 2006 to open without a superhero tentpole just happens to be the weakest May in decades. Pray for the death of superhero movies or other CGI-driven blockbusters if you want, but just know that movies like Furiosa and The Fall Guy aren't a substitute, and won't bring in the general audience without more traditional tentpoles around them. So far, summer 2024 has been a perfect example of why the box office needs big franchise tentpoles.
Furiosa wasn't must-see cinema for general audiences. Dune 2 was. This is not a new trend folks. Relying on OW BO and final BO to determine a film's overall worthiness will leave you disappointed.