Ugh, Let's Talk Box Office

I apologize in advance.

Over the more than two years of Aerial Shot (Jesus Christ), I feel like I’ve been pretty damn honest with you. Every week, I step up to the batter’s box and write a bunch of absurd garbage and some of you read it and I respect you for that. It pains me to say this, but here goes: I can’t do math.

I’ve tried over the years from my early schooling days to Honors Algebra for some reason to trying to come up with a tip after ordering a drink, and my mind just goes blank. I can do some basic arithmetic but that’s the full extent of it.

Don’t ask me for anything more than that.

This is why—well, for many reasons but numbers especially—I hate when the box office game comes up and people start running around like chickens without their heads trying to come to grips with why certain movies made less than expected and what this means for the film industry and how we can bolster those returns and what needs to be made to keep this business afloat.

It’s frankly a lame way to analyze the art form, but I understand why many are vexed and a bit worried. When something like Furiosa “bombs,” that ensures that other high-concept, less family-friendly projects won’t get greenlit. I do think that Furiosa is a unique case that was poorly marketed and never meant to do big numbers, but that doesn’t mean that people won’t treat it like the sky is falling.

First, let’s discuss Furiosa, a movie I’ve seen twice already and my favorite thing I’ve watched this year (so far). It’s a bummer that it’s now being positioned as a “box-office loser,” but the $168 million prequel to a spiritual sequel without the titular Mad Max franchise character was always going to be an uphill battle, especially with today’s audience habits.

People are more particular about what they’ll show up for—post-covid and in the streaming era—and this didn’t have the fanfare and social-media hype around it like a Barbenheimer or Marvel movie, or even on a smaller level like recent hits Anyone But You or a Civil War. There was no hot-button topic to immediately sink your teeth into, and it’s a nearly ten-years-in-the-making prequel with minimal dialogue in a post-apocalyptic world.

Fury Road did pretty well eventually making $379,436,354, but let’s not forget that it lost its opening weekend box office (by a pretty wide margin) to Pitch Perfect 2, which outgrossed the former by around $12M.

Fury Road did this though, so who really won?

Furiosa grossed $116,060,154 (writing this early on Wednesday) after a mediocre $26.3M opening. It’ll most likely eek back what it cost to make the movie but that’s not including marketing and promotional budgets. It’ll eventually be written down as a loss, which is bonkers when it’s so visually compelling, wonderfully acted and ridiculously (in the best way) directed.

Outside of Furiosa, movies are in a tough place. And the studios have no one to blame but themselves.

While trying to profit off of endless streaming services, pushing movies directly to your couch and minimizing the theater-release windows, the studios (with the help of the recent pandemic) have made theater-going less integral.

Personally, I know so many people who have decided to just wait for a movie to be rentable on Amazon or Apple instead of leaving their living room. The viewing habits have irreparably changed since Mad Max: Fury Road, and now people will only show up for cultural events from the aforementioned Barbenheimer to an online movement like Gentleminions.

The other thing that studios need to start thinking about is that these movies can’t rely on opening-weekend box office anymore, especially after strike after strike pushing the bigger productions back and turning 2024 into a wasteland of sorts.

You can’t treat all of your properties as if they’re a superhero behemoth that automatically will rake in the money the first few days; to be honest, the superheroes don’t even do that all the time anymore. Before the Marvel behemoth really got going, movies had longer theatrical windows in which word-of-mouth and positive press would keep them in theaters longer and audiences would show up week after week. A blockbuster hit like the nearly-30-years-old Titanic made a good deal of money its first month, of course, but it was also on screen for 54 weeks. Something big now like Dune 2 is out of all theaters but one across New York City. That was barely three months ago. It’s tough to have staying power when it’s streamable whenever you want.

Even recently, The Fall Guy did better the longer it was on the big screen. Anyone But You held strong into the new year. A few years back, The Greatest Showman “Became One Of The Leggiest Movies Ever”:

Besides, you can make the case that, for most folks, the Fox/Chermin/TGS release didn’t really “open” until Christmas Day (Monday the 25th), when it earned $5.5 million and really took off. It earned $2.445m on its opening day, a daily total that it wouldn’t match (or fall below) until its 16th day in theaters. As for that $8.8m Fri-Sun frame, it wouldn’t earn that little over a weekend until its seventh weekend when it earned $7.6m in early February. By that point, it had earned $137.3m domestic, or just under the $151m total of La La Land. It would be past that Oscar winner’s lifetime domestic cume just 1.5 weeks later. —Forbes

There is hope for movies but you have to keep them in theaters (and off streaming) long enough for people to actually show up. Habits change and unless something is going to be a cultural monster, people may wait a week or three before shelling out money at an AMC, Regal or whatever else.

I know that discussing money is a boring way to look at all of this, but it does matter since studios plan new movies, franchises and projects off of what does well. Furiosa fucking rules. No amount of dollars and cents can change that. I just hope that it eventually does well enough, or becomes a cult classic, so that George Miller can make one more prequel to the sequel to the decades-old franchise. I’ll damn sure throw some money down to see that in IMAX.