Box Office Report for the Week of May 26

Last week, I believed The Garfield Movie would ramp up the summer box office in a big way, and that comment was mainly based on my experience during its promo screening, where kids of all ages were completely eating it up with rapturous applause. My immediate reaction to the film was that it would be making lots of money, but the mostly negative reviews it has received likely put off families from saving money for another movie, such as Despicable Me 4, which I still believe to be the sole film this year to hit $1 billion.

Garfield may do more than Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga in its four-day tally, but as it stands, the movie made a rather underwhelming $24 million in over 4,000 venues. Meanwhile, George Miller‘s prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road didn’t fare any better, with a $25 million tally, making far less than anticipated, even if its stellar reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival hailed the movie as one of the greatest action pictures of the decade so far. As a result, we have on our hands the worst memorial day box office tally in thirty years.

I’m not surprised to see Furiosa petering at the box office. Regardless of what you think of Fury Road (it’s a masterpiece, in my humble opinion), the movie barely turned a profit in cinemas despite the slew of critical praise it got and accolades it received at the Academy Awards. There was no world in which Furiosa would make more than Fury Road or become a massive box office hit, and that’s the harsh reality, as much as the Film Twitter bubble hailed the movie as a masterpiece.

Unfortunately, social media is not real life, and what Film Twitter unanimously loves, audiences don’t much care for. I remember seeing Mad Max: Fury Road in high school and being immediately blown away by its craftsmanship and action scenes (I was also happy to be in a cinema after a brief hospital stint over a shoulder injury), only to find out that most of my classmates hated the movie and found it too weird. And with Film Twitter being Film Twitter, doomsaying posts on the future of cinemas have populated the timeline, with some even saying that cinemas won’t exist in 5-10 years from now if audiences don’t show up to support real movies. The definition of “real cinema” is subjective, and it’s much harder to gauge what audiences want, but if they didn’t like what came before, they certainly won’t show up for what’s next.

I don’t believe there is “one thing” to blame, whether it’s COVID, the strikes, the rise of the cost of living, or Universal’s insistence on shortening theatrical windows to kill the legs a movie immediately can have, but rather a combination of events that have made theatrical much less attractive than it did. It’s easy to blame the pandemic or a studio’s shortsighted decisions during a once-in-a-generation event (and, as we can see, it’s much harder to put the genie back in the bottle than releasing it), but theatrical has been on the downward spiral for a long time, with COVID accelerating its decline. Ticket prices are too expensive (very expensive), and bad audience behavior has been exacerbated since the pandemic (a physical altercation almost broke out during a screening of Through the Night after an audience member politely told a couple to stop talking as the movie was playing).

It also doesn’t help that movies’ quality is declining, whether through their stories or image-making powers. That’s why movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer were so important last year, as they reminded audiences of how truly great the big screen can be when all of its resources are in front of us. Beyond Dune: Part Two and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, there hasn’t been a true big-screen event that showcases the potential of groundbreaking large-scale cinema (some will tell me to add Furiosa to that list, but unfortunately, it is currently not commercially successful). There may not be a movie this summer that reminds audiences of the big screen’s true power, which can signal some alarm bells in Hollywood.

Perhaps they will eventually wake up because they need cinemas to ensure the perennity of their biggest films, regardless of the ridiculous things Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said about how Barbie and Oppenheimer would have the same cultural impact had they been released on Netflix instead of cinemas (spoiler alert: they wouldn’t have). I’m optimistic about the future of cinema. Things may take some time to return to normal, but it will eventually do. As Sean Baker so brilliantly said while he accepted his Palme d’Or for Anora at the Cannes Film Festival, “The future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theater.”

Here is the full list of the top ten films of the weekend:

1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Warner Bros): $25.6M – 3,804 theatres
2. The Garfield Movie (Sony): $24.8M – 4,035 theatres
3. IF (Paramount): $16.1M (-52%) – 4,068 theatres
4. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Disney): $13.4M (-48%) – 3,550 theatres
5. The Fall Guy (Universal): $5.9M (-29%) – 2,955 theatres
6. The Strangers: Chapter 1 (Lionsgate): $5.6M (-53%) – 2,856 theatres
7. Sight (Angel Studios): $2.7M – 2,100 theatres
8. Challengers (Amazon MGM Studios): $1.4M (-52%) – 1,089 theatres
9. Babes (NEON): $1.1M (+550%) – 590 theatres
10. Back to Black (Universal): $1.1M (-63%) – 2,013 theatres

Source: Comscore