‘Furiosa’ crashes and burns as ‘Garfield’ looks for a box office tie
Garfield may hate Mondays, but when the final numbers come in, his new movie might beat the latest ‘Mad Max’ film.
Hello! Welcome to The Box Office Report for the weekend of May 24-26, 2024.
1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Weekend gross: $25.6M
Total domestic gross: $25.6M
Last weekend: New release
Percent drop: NA
Leading up to this weekend, there had been some joking about the combo of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and The Garfield Movie being this year’s version of Barbenheimer. The Memorial Day weekend box office turned out to be the joke.
While Barbie and Oppenheimer combined to gross $244.5 million over their opening weekend last July, Furiosa and Garfield (Garfuriosa?) limped out to an estimated $50.3 million three-day debut. Even with Monday still left to go, this is going to be one of the worst Memorial Day weekends for the box office, no matter if you’re looking at three-day or four-day performances. (The three-day Memorial Day weekend debuts since the pandemic: A Quite Place: Part II with $47.5 million, Top Gun: Maverick with $126.7 million and The Little Mermaid with $95.6 million.)
It’s hard to point at any one thing to explain why things went so poorly this weekend. Were moviegoers not interested in Furiosa? The New York Times cites the movie being a prequel and the gap between it and 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road as reasons why people didn’t show up. (They also suggest Furiosa “may have been released too soon after the similar-looking Dune: Part Two,” which is a hilarious thing to write.)
