Despite Furiosa's stalled start, the summer box office is not collapsing (at least, not yet)
If the common insider wisdom is to be believed, the movie industry is in dire straits because Furiosa underperformed at the box office in its opening weekend — an event that singularly heralds a dire summer season in 2024 that lacks the kind of no-lose back-to-back blockbusters that audiences head to the theaters in suitable numbers to see. Since Furiosa made just $32.3 million in its opening weekend, there have been countless expressions of concern — both genuine and, shall we say, somewhat less-so — surrounding the question of just how bad this summer is going to be for theater owners, studios, and audiences alike, all with the same takeaway: everything is awful.
While I am not going to downplay the very real probability that lower foot traffic at theaters this summer is going to hurt theater owners and, by extension, the movie industry, I do want to suggest that calmer heads need to be prevailing right now — and that, while summer 2024 isn’t going to be an easy one for theaters and studios, it might be an instructional one worth paying attention to, instead.
While I get that Furiosa underperformed in its opening weekend, in terms of box office take, it’s worth pushing back at the notion that the movie bombed entirely. It made $32.3 million across the four-day holiday weekend domestically, which was less than $10m short of the $40m that it was expected to make. This arguably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given that female-led action movies have traditionally struggled at the box office — in the past few years, think of the fates of The Marvels, The 355, Birds of Prey, Terminator: Dark Fate, and more. To double down on the “maybe we should have expected this,” it’s worth remembering that Mad Max: Fury Road itself didn’t top the charts on its own first weekend; it was beaten back into second place by Pitch Perfect 2.
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