Neither a fat cat nor a ravening pack of post-apocalyptic Australian warlords could save US cinemas from their worst performance over the Memorial Day weekend in nearly three decades.
George Miller’s origins tale Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga just pipped pizza-loving feline Garfield to the top spot, taking $32m (£25m) over the four days, compared with Garfield’s $31.1m (£24m). Ghostly animation Casper took $22m (£17m) over the same period in 1995, but ever since then receipts have been up – excluding in 2020, when cinemas were entirely closed due to Covid.
The softness of both new movies’ opening weekend has come as a shock to the beleaguered industry, which is still reeling from the underperformance of films such as The Fall Guy earlier in the year. Comscore estimates that ticket sales remain 22% behind 2023 and 41% behind pre-pandemic’s 2019.
This time last year, Disney’s The Little Mermaid remake had helped lift takings considerably – which are nearly 36% lower this year – with $118m (£92.4m), ahead of the huge boon Barbenheimer brought a month or so later.
Even in 2021, takings were considerably more healthy, with A Quiet Place Part II scoring $57.1m (£44.7m) over Memorial Day weekend.
Furiosa, whose budget has been estimated at $168m (£131.6m), had been expected to open with around $40-45m (£31-35m), around the same as the previous instalment Mad Max: Fury Road, which debuted on a normal weekend in the US, rather than over a holiday period, ahead of a final total of $380m (£298m) globally.
Sequel fatigue has been credited for the disappointing takings, as well as the fact original stars Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy didn’t return. Garfield is better placed: the Chris Pratt-voiced animation has already made back half of its budget in the US alone.
This is the first year since 2009 when a Marvel movie hasn’t kicked off the early summer period; cinemagoers will have to wait until much later in the season for the first superhero offering to appear. Even then, younger punters will be excluded as Deadpool & Wolverine carries an R-rating in the US.
Hopes are increasingly resting on children’s sequels Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 to winch the summer box office out of its doldrums, before adult-oriented sequels to Joker, Gladiator and Venom arrive later in the year.