George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road prequel, Furiosa, has not been performing very well in theaters since it went on release last Friday, and unless there's a drastic improvement in box office takings, this could spell doom for the legendary filmmaker's plans for a follow-up.
via: THR
The revered filmmaker’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga bowed to a disappointing $32 million domestically for the four-day Memorial Day weekend and $36.5 million overseas, diminishing hopes for Mad Max: The Wasteland, another Max installment Miller has been toying with for years.
Miller and Nico Lathouris wrote the scripts for both The Wasteland and Furiosa as part of the development process of Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2015 Warner Bros. film that became a surprise awards season juggernaut, winning six Oscars, and which became an instant action classic. The Wasteland would follow Max Rockatansky in the year before Fury Road, and is said to involve a young mother — and (naturally) include plenty of action.
In recent weeks, Miller has acknowledged much was hinging on Furiosa in terms of the possibility of The Wasteland. “I’ll definitely wait to see how this [Furiosa] goes, before we even think about it,” Miller told journalists May 16, the morning after the dystopian action-adventure played at the Cannes Film Festival to a seven-minute standing ovation. Sources agree that Wasteland’s fate is complicated by Furiosa‘s box office, but stress it wasn’t even in development. For its part, Warners — where Miller is a beloved figure — says it is incredibly proud of Furiosa.
The reaction from moviegoers is likely as positive as Miller hoped; it boasts a 90 percent positive audience score rating on Rotten Tomatoes and earned a B+ Cinemascore. But in a troubling and unexpected twist, far fewer females and younger male adults showed up than came out for Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road nine years ago.
On Fury Road’s opening weekend, the split was 60 percent male to 40 percent, according to sources with access to exit surveys conducted by PostTrak. But Furiosa’s audience was 71 percent male and 29 percent female, a worrisome decline and a startling number for a feature marketed as a female-driven vehicle. And the 18-24 age group, who are the most frequent moviegoers, plummeted from 31 percent for Fury Road to 21 percent for Furiosa.
Observers note that Fury Road aside, the male-fueled Mad Max series has always catered to a somewhat niche audience. The first three films, starring Mel Gibson, grossed less than $70 million combined domestically.
“IP like Mad Max and Ghostbusters is old, and they have the fans they’re going to have,” says one theater chain executive. “If studios can budget to that, they might make some decent money.”
Talk of making Miller’s next Mad Max film could resurface if Furiosa gets a major tune up and enjoys a road trip down the box office highway, as Fury Road did thanks to a strong multiplier. But many veteran box office pundits are doubtful whether such a recovery is possible, with one rival studio saying it could have a hard time getting past $90 million domestically.
Fury Road, which successfully rebooted the franchise by recasting Gibson with Tom Hardy and introducing Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, opened to $45.3 million domestically on its way to grossing $379.4 million worldwide — a juggernaut by the standards of the franchise, and a modest hit by Hollywood standards considering it had a net budget of at least $157 million before marketing. Still, it had an outsized cultural impact, enough for the previous regime at Warner Bros. to greenlight Furiosa, as it seemed the studio had a revitalized franchise on its hands, and it would be a way of honoring Miller and the 45-year anniversary of Mad Max. Miller, who remains a beloved figure within the studio, prefers to shoot practically as much as possible before having visual effects supplement the rest, which pushes up production costs.
Yorumlar