Furiosa’s opening weekend numbers have been a point of discourse for many trades after its release. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Furiosa slumped to a $26 million gross between Friday, May 24, and Sunday, May 26. However, Furiosa was released over the Memorial Day weekend, taking its estimated domestic total to between $31-33 million. Concerning how Furiosa fared overseas, the reading is not much better. In territories outside of the United States and Canada, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga earned around $33 million, taking its worldwide total opening weekend haul to a lowly $64-66 million.
Although Furiosa is receiving positive reviews, its box office returns for its opening weekend are underwhelming. Many could point to the film itself and wonder why Furiosa specifically is not resonating with audiences, though the issue is much broader than any one film. Instead, Hollywood as a whole has been suffering with box office success in recent years, with a variety of reasons factoring into this disappointing stretch of failed movies. Furiosa, unfortunately, is simply the latest in a long line of underperforming movies that, if its great reception is anything to go by, should be earning much more.
The first problem facing Furiosa has affected other 2024 releases like The Fall Guy. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the wait time between a movie ending its theatrical run and being released on digital is increasingly shortening. The Fall Guy’s poor box office was capped off with the announcement it would release on digital only two weeks after releasing in theaters. This shrinking wait time is causing audiences to stop spending money in theaters in favor of cheaper, home-video options, which has evidently impacted Furiosa too.
Aside from wider industry problems, Furiosa’s status as a prequel is likely a factor contributing to its poor box office. In recent years, prequels to giant movies simply do not have the same pull as they once might have. Some instances include Solo: A Star Wars Story and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, both of which grossed significantly less than their other franchise installments. Furiosa is now following suit, with a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road obviously not high on the list of stories general audiences desired.
I also think Fury Road was mid at best for an action movie in general, not just for the series. All of the people putting it on “best of all time” lists makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
EDIT: Ah yes, “objective narrative measures”. Do you have a handy list of these “objective narrative measures”, along with precise, unambiguous methods of quantifying them?
Yes, objective relative to the rules or conventions of visual storytelling in an anatomic sense. This means the literal structure of the action and its values relative to characters.
Each shot (that is not in a moment of montage) has a quantifiable beginning-middle-end that is motivated by the character’s actions on the screen, and again nested inside of the sequence or scene. The reason most people experience the pace of Mad Max as unrelentingly brisk is due to the lack of wasted frames on characters. It is hyper efficient. There isn’t a single shot-reverse shot dialogue in the whole film. There isn’t unmotivated action. There is not an unnecessary or missing character on screen. And the framing from edit to edit does not yank your eye somewhere it’s not meant to be.
Compare this to another all-time action film, Bourne Ultimatum—which has an insane volume of superfluous or narratively unmotivated camera coverage in its action. Literally the action 50% of the time, while utterly spectacular, does not advance the characters at all, and certainly does not have an opinion of its action to infer from the camera choices.
You’re also completely entitled to not care and think it’s boring! But there are definitely objective storytelling mechanics that are binary insofar as they are present or not on a scene to scene, shot to shot basis.
Ok, do you have a handy list of these objective narrative measures then, along with precise, unambiguous methods of quantifying them in a manner that can objectively determine an action movie’s quality?
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can we objectively know when a character’s actions are or aren’t sufficiently “motivated”? And even if the beginning-middle-end can somehow be shown to be objectively motivated by the character’s actions on the screen, how can you prove that a lack of this sort of beginning-middle-end is objectively bad?
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “wasted” be objectively defined here? How do we even know that “wasted” frames are objectively bad?
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “unmotivated” be objectively defined here? How do we even know that “unmotivated” action is objectively bad?
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “unnecessary” or “missing” be objectively defined here? Also, how do we even know that “unnecessary” or “missing” characters are objectively bad?
By your subjective judgment, unless you can somehow show otherwise. Also, how do we even know that the camera yanking your eye somewhere its not meant to be is objectively bad?
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “superfluous” and “narratively unmotivated” be objectively defined here? And even if they could, how can you show that this is objectively bad?
Great! Back to my original question then, since nothing you’ve said here has been relevant to it: what are they, and by what metrics are they precisely defined and quantified? And more importantly, how does that objectively prove that Fury Road is a top 10 action movie?
In short, judging art is always subjective. That is inescapable, and attempts to “objectify” it are doomed to fail, because in the end there’s just no accounting for taste. You can tell me why you like Fury Road, and you can even show me that your opinion lines up with “critics” or professors at your film school, but even that is an appeal to authority, and their opinions have as little to do with true objectivity as yours or mine do.
There are many things that are objectively provable, but Fury Road being a top 10 action movie according to “narrative measures” is not one of them.
With all due respect, you’re straw manning me quite a bit. I never said anything was “bad” and I never call into question taste. There is not an objective metric to enjoyment of movies or art etc.
There are objective—e.g true or false statements—about the film or story itself. A story absolutely is objectively measurable in a structural sense. You can contend that your enjoyment of a movie is totally subjective, which it is, however you nonetheless would likely agree that for some reason 95% of the stories you consume conform to common structural conventions.
You can test this by playing any number of these action movies side by side with a stopwatch if you’d like, and time when the narrative milestones occur. You could do the same for scene length relative to the purpose of each scene in the story.
There are methods of structuring story elements that absolutely will affect the way you successfully or unsuccessfully enjoy a story.
For example: it is objectively incorrect if you said John Wick follows the conventions of a body horror film. The evidence? Quite literally the actions of the characters and subsequently the mise-en-scene which is there to support your consumption of said characters.
But let’s take a much more obvious example instead of comparing Hollywood tent pole films.
The 2011 film Samsara is considered a documentary film. I would argue it is “documentary” in the most basic sense, in that it quite literally documents happenings on earth—from the directors’ point of view obviously.
Their are objective facts about this movie: it is shot on medium lenses which replicate the human eye, it has very saturated color hue, and there are 0 characters.
You can love this film and feel all sorts of things. But you definitely won’t love the main character and how he does XYZ. It doesn’t have this; it is not a story. The director may say something like “it is a story” in the meta sense, but that is interpolation ultimately, and not something he shot from a screenplay for you to enjoy.
I think if you made film and television for a living, you would likely completely change your perspective.
Hey, I’m a bit late to this discussion, but…
When I was in grad school I looked over the literature on discourse analysis. Basically, you get a bunch of people, you show them a text, then you ask them questions about how they perceive the narrative structure of the story. Usually you have a theory based on something like Rhetorical Structure Theory. You do statistics on their responses and measure agreement. You’re trying to find out if people will reliably agree on the structure of a text when they read it.
When people are reading certain types of highly-structured texts, people will generally agree on where the boundaries of the various components are. But that’s not the case for fiction. It’s hard to get people to objectively agree on the structure of a story.
However, you mention other features like number of shots and scene length, and those are very likely to have a high degree of agreement in human observers. It’s just important to keep in mind the difference between what we as an individual observer identify, and what a population of human observers identify.
(btw I agree that Fury Road is a killer movie, I totally need to see it again.)