It was a letdown of a weekend atop the box office, as Furiosa opened low and barely passed The Garfield Movie for the top spot. The Mad Max: Fury Road prequel opened with $25.8 million through Sunday and an estimated $31 million for the four-day frame.
That’s well below the $40 million to $45 million that was expected for the four-day take, marking a tough start for an expensive blockbuster. Warner Bros. can’t be pleased about this result; after all, Furiosa had a pretty solid buzz carrying it into the weekend.
It’s part of an iconic franchise and the critical buzz was great with an 89% aggregated score on Rotten Tomatoes. And word of mouth has been very good with a B+ CinemaScore and a 91% RT audience rating (on par with Fury Road’s B+ and 86% RT audience score). So what went wrong here? A lot of gloom and doom about the box office has been written about, but the more relevant answer is two-fold.
First off, the Mad Max franchise has never appealed as a four-quadrant film the way that the biggest blockbusters have. That proved true with Furiosa , which brought in a younger audience heavily skewed to men. The second half if the answer is that Warner Bros.
’ marketing let the film down, as it wasn’t able to cut through the overall noise the way a film of its size typically does. Furiosa isn’t doing wonderful overseas, either. It brought in $33.
3 million internationally for a $64.3 million worldwide take through Sunday, which gives it a steep mountain to climb consi.
