Weekend box office: Furiosa top on slowest Memorial Day weekend in years

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will come out of Memorial Day weekend on top of the box office chart, but its $26.3-million estimated three-day opening is a significant disappointment. That is a smaller debut than The Fall Guy managed at the beginning of May, and that film wasn’t the latest installment in a multi-Oscar winning franchise. While both films got good reviews from critics, Furiosa has the edge in that department too, with critic and audience scores both running at 90% positive on Rotten Tomatoes right now and a B+ CinemaScore. Unfortunately, the weak opening for Furiosa isn’t the last of the bad news this weekend, which, outside of the 2020 pandemic, will be the weakest Memorial Day weekend in years.

Here’s how the weekend numbers look as of Monday morning (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…

Furiosa is coming in 13% behind our Friday-morning prediction, which isn’t terrible, but suggests that it’s not turning into a word-of-mouth hit any time soon. Warner Bros. estimates its global opening weekend at $65 million, meaning it is doing fractionally better abroad, although not enough to make up for the weak domestic opening. The studio will be hoping for long legs in theaters, and the good news on that front is that it won’t have a huge amount of competition compared to a normal Summer. So perhaps $100 million is still on the cards domestically, and maybe $200 million worldwide. That’s a long way short of the $370-million global total earned by Mad Max: Fury Road.

The Garfield Movie will come in second this weekend, and won’t be far behind Furiosa over the four-day long weekend—given that general increase in family audiences on holidays, the two films will probably be within $1 million of each other by close of business on Monday. Garfield is also beating our Friday prediction, albeit by a fairly modest 7%. Given its weak reviews, its performance is actually a minor victory.

The other new wide release, Sight is having a disappointing start by the standards of Angel Studios. In fact, it’ll be their weakest opening so far, although that’s more of a statement about how well the studio has done in its short history—this is a respectable number for a drama aimed at a niche audience. The market could really have used something better though.

The one brighter piece of news is that Neon’s comedy Babes made it into the top 10 this weekend. It’s the distributors first film since Immaculate, which outperformed expectations in March, and this is shaping up to be their best year since they released Oscar-winner Parasite back in 2019–2020.

Those minor pieces of good news don’t hide the fact that this has been a massively disappointing Summer season so far. While no release has been a complete disaster, we haven’t had a film over-perform to any significant degree yet. Audiences just don’t seem to be in the habit of going to movie theaters at the moment, and we’re running out of opportunities to turn the year around.

– Studio weekend projections

– All-time top-grossing movies in North America

– All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com