Furiosa Just Killed All Hope for Another Mad Max Movie, Flopped in Theaters
What’s the point of being loved by the people if you have to pay millions for it?
A long-anticipated prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, Anya Taylor-Joy-led Furiosa premiered last Friday, on May 24, 2024. With all the hype surrounding the movie and its predecessor’s legacy, we expected Furiosa to conquer the box office in no time… However, that hasn’t happened so far, and things are looking pretty bleak for Taylor-Joy’s first post-apocalyptic outing in terms of finance.
Furiousa’s Opening Weekend Was Unimpressive
Despite being a phenomenally well-crafted movie in a very well-established franchise with a really star-studded cast, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga failed to rake up a significant amount of money in its opening weekend. For the first six days of its theatrical run, Furiosa can only show $68M as its box office haul, and it gets worse.
The split between domestic and global markets is almost even and thus doesn’t matter. What’s important, though, is that Furiosa had a production budget of $168M and needs to reach at least $330M to double that amount and break even. Judging from its first-week performance, the predictions are rather pessimistic, but we’ll see whether things change for the better with the second weekend. They rarely do.
Furiosa Might Have Killed Another Mad Max Movie
Previously, George Miller, the director of both Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa, went on record teasing another Mad Max project. Following Max himself in the year before the events of Fury Road, The Wasteland already exists in the form of a novella but hasn’t been published yet — and Miller considered making it into a movie under one condition. That condition had to do with Furiosa’s performance.
“I'd say it certainly has a lot of action in it, but it is also a saga. It's a year-long story. <...> [For] The Wasteland, I'm still figuring out what to do, but I'm simply waiting to see the reception of Furiosa and if it all lines up, we'll go ahead with it,” Miller shared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
The fate of The Wasteland (the movie, not the region, of course) will be defined by Furiosa’s future performance at the box office… And, perhaps, Miller’s definition of “reception” — because despite its poor financial state, Furiosa is unanimously praised by the critics and viewers, raking up 90% from both on Rotten Tomatoes and maintaining a confident 7.9/10 score on IMDb.
Source: Happy Sad Confused via YouTube