Furiosa is a flop – is this the end of the cinema era?

The long American Memorial Day weekend is usually one of the most profitable of the year for films. The last Monday in May is a public holiday in honour of those who died in combat. This means the weekend is a day longer than usual, impacting weekend takings. And Hollywood studios like to maximise this. If a new film starts with good opening weekend figures in cinemas, it can be marketed better as a potential blockbuster.

It’s just a shame when the plan goes wrong. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opened in cinemas last Memorial Day weekend. To everyone’s surprise, it flopped so badly that many people see this as the end of the cinema era.

But is that fair?

Has the pandemic irrevocably damaged the industry?

In terms of figures, this is the scale of the disaster we’re looking at. Despite excellent reviews, George Miller’s apocalyptic, frenzied ride has grossed just 32 million US dollars. That’s bad. Even Disney’s much maligned The Little Mermaid grossed 118 million dollars on Memorial Day a year ago. As if that wasn’t insult enough, Furiosa almost had to concede defeat to The Garfield Movie, which is just a kids’ film. And yet, it grossed 31.2 million dollars.

That’s not all. If you wanted to find the most-watched film on Memorial Day that made even less than Furiosa, you’d have to go back almost 30 years (!) to 1995’s Casper.

The cinema industry is sounding the alarm.

There have been plenty of attempts to explain why cinema is losing its appeal. For instance, people often criticise how slow new cinema technologies develop, especially compared to picture quality in TVs. OLED, 4K resolution and Dolby Vision have long since left the cinema behind, at least in technological terms. Add to this the rapid progress of streaming and increasingly popularity of shows competing with cinema attendance, which itself is also becoming more expensive. I reported on this back in 2018:

However, the flop of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga could also stem from the Covid pandemic. Cinemas were closed for months during lockdowns, so studios shifted releases to their in-house streaming services. It’s something we quickly got used to. More than cinema operators would’ve liked.

Warner Bros. film studio, for instance, still relied on simultaneous cinema and streaming service releases in 2021, even though the last lockdowns were already over. The aim was to make the company’s own streaming portal HBO Max more attractive and market it better. But instead, it dealt cinemas a rash punch in the gut. After all, why buy an expensive ticket when you can watch the same film at home on your big TV screen for much cheaper than you’d pay for popcorn?

«I’ll wait until you can stream it» is something I often hear amongst my friends. It never used to be that way. Before, we’d wait an average of at least three months before a film was available on DVD. Now, it’s only 30 to 45 days – so just over a month. A wait that many cinema goers are obviously prepared to put up with.

Or are they?

Was Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga maybe overrated?

Equally, there are also people who don’t see the looming Furiosa flop as an alarm signal. Quite the opposite, in fact. They believe it was obvious Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga would have a hard time at the box office. Or rather, that it had to. So it can’t be considered a surprising or alarming flop.

One of these people is Deadline journalist Anthony D’Alessandro, a box office expert. He argues in his article that the action genre was simply overrated. Many forget that Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the most dazzling examples of exquisite action fireworks. But even Fury Road wasn’t a particularly big box office hit back then, only making 380 million dollars worldwide. A moderate success at best, with production and marketing costs of around 300 million dollars. Furiosa cost the studio about the same.

According to D’Alessandro, we can put the fact that the collective memory of pop culture nevertheless remembers Fury Road as a milestone in cinema down to its ten subsequent Oscar nominations rather than financial success. One of them was even in the Best Film category, unheard of for something so unconventional. In the end, Fury Road won six Oscars, making it one of the big winners of that awards night. With that in mind, shouldn’t the sequel have done much better given all this momentum?

In his article, D’Alessandro disagrees. Experience shows that prequels have a harder time at the box office than sequels. But equally, the genre is too niche and not suitable for the masses. In the US, both films carry an R rating. In Switzerland, this roughly corresponds to a 16 age rating. In addition, eccentric characters, explicit depictions of violence, loud roaring engines and barren desert apocalypses don’t appeal to everyone. The previous Mad Max films from the 80s starring Mel Gibson were considered nothing more than niche successes. The triumph of Fury Road was an exception – and only a moderate one at that,

as evidenced by the figures. A mere 2% of American audiences going to see Furiosa were below the age limit of 17. Meanwhile, only 29% were women, and 9% of all cinema goers were over 55. This would remove a large section of the potential audience that should’ve ensured high sales on Memorial Day. Warner Bros. Studio ought to have taken this into account when it awarded director George Miller such a large budget again in the hope of achieving a new blockbuster hit.

Or in D’Alessandro’s words: «It was a ballsy greenlight.»

The end? Not really

D’Alessandro’s explanations sound plausible, deescalating, even. As he reports it, the cinema industry isn’t as badly off as you might think given the lean pandemic years. His assessment is supported by both the Swiss Federal Statistical Office and the German Federal Film Board.

Their figures show that Swiss cinemas sold over 10 million tickets in 2023, more than at any time since the start of the pandemic. Compared to 2022, the number of cinema tickets rose by 20% and as a result, they were only 16% below the figure for the strong cinema year of 2019. In neighbouring Germany, the theme is the same. In 2023, cinemas achieved 81% of ticket sales and around 91% of turnover compared to 2019, the last year before the pandemic.

The signs are pointing to recovery.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that 2023 saw many surprisingly big box-office hits, with Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie being two films that broke through the impressive one billion sales barrier. Oppenheimer and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 weren’t far behind. By contrast, the currently most successful film in 2024, Dune: Part Two would only be in fifth place in 2023, just ahead of Fast X and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The current runner-up, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire would only be in tenth place in 2023.

So, is the cinema era coming to an end after all? Hardly. Despite ever-improving TVs and ever-earlier home cinema releases, it would’ve been hard to explain such a strong year in 2023 if people didn’t want to go to the cinema any more. The difference is they’ve become more selective. They no longer go out to watch average films that don’t stand out from the crowd. But for good films, yes, they’ll watch them on the big screen. Did you hear that, Hollywood film studios? Good films. Even supposedly woke social critiques like Barbie or ponderous three-hour epics such as Oppenheimer.

That’s what we’ve uncovered.