How Hollywood Failed "Furiosa"
How Hollywood Failed "Furiosa"
George Miller's latest addition to the "Mad Max" franchise is a stellar film, but it came out at the wrong time.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is excellent. Out of everything that has come out in the first half of 2024, it easily ranks as one of the best and is probably among the better films released in the last five years. A prequel and spin-off to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, it delivers similar levels of high-octane action, while arguably being the most fleshed-out and lore-heavy entry in George Miller’s Australian post-apocalyptic franchise.
But this isn’t a review of Furiosa. If you’re a long-time fan of the Mad Max series as I am, you were likely already there on day one and will probably be back multiple times. If you’re less familiar with these films, I still recommend seeing it, especially on the biggest cineplex screen you can. It’s the kind of movie that IMAX was made for.
Instead, I’m here this week to talk about failure. Specifically, why Furiosa is doing so poorly at the box office. Despite premiering on Memorial Day weekend, one of the most lucrative seasons for new Hollywood films, the Fury Road prequel only brought in a paltry $31 million, while as of this writing it’s earned a total of about $119 million against its $168 million budget. When you also factor in marketing costs, the film just breaking even seem unlikely.
Those are very disappointing numbers to put it lightly, but I believe multiple factors have contributed to Furiosa being in the current state it’s in. This puts the future of the Mad Max franchise in question, and while there is plenty of reason to be pessimistic, I don’t think all hope is lost either. Let’s start with a post-mortem of what went wrong.
“Mad Max” Without Mad Max
The first reason for Furiosa’s lack of resonance with potential audiences should be pretty obvious — it’s the first Mad Max film without protagonist Max Rockatansky. The “Mad Max Saga” subtitle was likely a conscious decision by Warner Bros. or perhaps even Miller himself to remind people what franchise Furiosa is part of, but in the end it seems to have done little to alleviate skepticism.
I’ll be honest, I too was initially apprehensive of Max being MIA in his own franchise. My own memory of Fury Road from the one time I saw it in 2015 was that it was a very well-made film, but that Tom Hardy’s Max felt sidelined in favor of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. However upon watching all of the Mad Max films, including Fury Road, for the first time in nearly a decade, I realized that I was mistaken. Hardy actually has more screen time than Theron, while the story heavily relies on them both needing each other. That fits well with the film’s theme of cooperation being necessary for survival, so I no longer believe that Max was unimportant in Fury Road. Chalk that up to my own ignorance.
Furiosa too is about survival and its story does a good job conveying Furiosa’s harrowing journey from kidnapped child to the tough-as-nails officer in antagonist Immortan Joe’s army we later see in Fury Road. The film is not in any way “woke” nor is Furiosa an invincible “girl boss,” but I’ll return to that later. I found myself surprised that I actually did want to learn more about Furiosa’s backstory when I initially wanted to see another movie starring Max. By the end, I realized that Furiosa was not just a prequel to Fury Road, but also something that enhanced it with additional backstory and context. It avoids the pitfalls most prequels have with too much exposition and a lack of surprise since the audience already knows what comes next.
Since Furiosa is based on unused story material for Fury Road Miller wrote years ago, the two films have a close relationship with one another. The problem, which we are now seeing with the box office returns, is getting audiences to care. It’s the same issue Solo: A Star Wars Story faced with also being a prequel telling a niche story and being the least successful entry in its respective franchise, not counting the 2008 animated Clone Wars film. Most causal viewers are not interested in a Han Solo film without Harrison Ford, and I would bet that most never moved past the skepticism I held about a Mad Max film without Mad Max. Solo wasn’t a bad film and Furiosa is a very good one, but their quality doesn’t necessarily translate into financial success.
A Successful, But Sleeper Hit Franchise
Apart from Furiosa not focusing on Mad Max, it’s sometimes easy to forget that Mad Max itself isn’t the most popular franchise out there. Sure, by all accounts it’s very successful, and the second film in particular had a massive influence on how most post-apocalyptic dystopian worlds are depicted in media. You don’t get Fist of the North Star for example without Mad Max.
If we look at the numbers, we can see that easily the most profitable entry in the series was the first one. The film’s budget is estimated to have been around 400,000 Australian dollars, which is the equivalent to about $265,000 USD. Box Office Mojo records that the film made a little under $9 million during its theatrical run, but Wikipedia cites sources that claim it made a grand total of over $100 million, which we can assume is from theatrical re-runs and home video sales. The exact figures are probably never going to be known, but it’s clear that Miller and company went to the bank happy. The original Mad Max launched countless careers after all.
Mad Max 2 and 3 show a similar story. Miller’s sequel was given a higher budget of A$4.5 million and the threequel even more at A$12 million. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior went on to earn about $24 million USD worldwide and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome $35 million USD. While Mad Max: Fury Road took home the most in sheer box office totals at $380 million USD, keep in mind that its budget ballooned to around $185 million, which doesn’t include marketing costs. Fury Road ultimately did alright enough to satisfy Warner Bros., but we aren’t talking Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Avengers: Endgame numbers because Mad Max is simply not on the same level of popularity as those franchises.
Anecdotally, most people I talk to who have seen or heard of Mad Max are *only* familiar with Fury Road and have not watched the original trilogy with Mel Gibson. Fury Road did respectable numbers during its initial theatrical run, but it’s really only in the ensuing years has its reputation grown as one of the best action films of all time. Those who’ve seen Fury Road generally do seem to really like it, but whether or not that enjoyment would extend to spending money to go to a cinema to watch a prequel spin-off is another story.
Furthermore, Furiosa is divided into five chapters throughout its 2 hour and 28 minute runtime, which made me wonder if it would have been more successful as a limited television series. One common criticism that even people who enjoyed the film had was that the film was too long, and perhaps that too was another factor in those undecided about seeing it ultimately waiting for it to come to streaming. Some stories are too niche to get people to go to a cinema, but television at home can be a better format. While I’m not necessarily saying Furiosa should have been a television show, TV might end up being the only place Mad Max has a future in.
Rising Consumer Costs
Here’s another reason why no one saw Furiosa that you’ve probably figured out by now — movies are too damn expensive! Recent statistics place the average price of a ticket at the American chain AMC Theatres at nearly $12. In some of America’s bigger cities, prices can even approach as high as $20. Obviously this is going to vary from state to state and venue to venue, but it’s impossible to deny at this point that the cost of going to the movies has overall gotten more expensive in the last decade.
It’s not just the United States either. The United Kingdom faces this problem and so do we in Japan. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed it too in your own country. There are of course ways to alleviate this via monthly memberships and student discounts if you live around venues that offers them like I do. Interestingly enough, Japanese chains like Toho Cinemas often lower the prices of showings past 8 p.m., which is in contrast to matinee tickets being cheaper in the United States.
But even with those tactics, that’s a lot of work just to see one film when most stuff that’s out in theaters hits streaming services at home in record time these days. I remember waiting six months or more for a movie to come to DVD as a kid, but times have long changed. Few apart from physical media psychos (I mean enthusiasts) like me even care enough to buy individual movies anymore. Everything now needs to be provided via a single service or the average consumer simply isn’t interested.
The price of the film ticket is only the beginning too. Cinemas make the bulk of their money from concession sales, which means that your drink and popcorn are often going to cost even more than the movie itself. Multiply all of that if you’re bringing the kids. IMAX showings cost more. Better seats cost more. Parking costs money. Gas costs money if you live far away. I’m very lucky to be within walking distance of many cinemas in Kyoto, but most don’t have that luxury and it’s completely understandable why so many are staying home to watch movies.
When you pair that with the reality that general costs of living are rising, is it really any wonder that less people are going to the cinema these days? There are exceptions such as the rare colossal moviegoing event like “Barbenheimer,” and I’m frankly still trying to understand how that one happened, but Furiosa was never going to reach that level of cultural reach in our post-pandemic world of media consumption. People have simply adapted to watching movies at home where it’s more affordable, more convenient, and less of a hassle. I’ll always prefer the big screen experience myself as a hardcore cinephile, but I’m fully aware that I don’t represent the average consumer.
The Hollywood Landscape
Finally, consider how most audiences think about the current state of Hollywood. Or more accurately, consider how people don’t seem to be thinking about Hollywood at all.
Many media outlets dubbed 2023 as the year of the “flopbuster” — absurdly expensive films that completely bombed at the box office and cost studios hundreds of millions of dollars. Movies are getting more expensive to make, but when the results are largely terrible sequels like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (see my review tearing it a new one here) and uninspired superhero junk like The Marvels, it should comes as no surprise that people aren’t showing up to waste their money.
I think that the term “woke” is greatly overused and misused at this point, but there’s undoubtedly a streak of ham-fisted agenda-pushing that audiences are sick of. Does anyone really want to hear Harvey Weinstein’s former secretary bragging about how her latest Star Wars show is the “gayest” ever? There’s nothing wrong with having political or social themes in media, but at least liberal anger in the 1970s gave us classics like M*A*S*H and All The President’s Men. The Trump years have given us, well, this cringe.
But what does this specifically have to do with Furiosa? While harder to prove than the other points I’ve made, I think it’s plausible that some people at least dismissed the film as another “girl boss” woke-fest which replaced a once-beloved male protagonist with a cooler, hipper female one. I cannot state this enough though, Furiosa is NOT that kind of movie. Yes, Max is largely absent, but Furiosa is given a compelling character arc that draws the viewer in and makes them want to keep watching. She’s far from flawless either. Throughout her journey, Furiosa gets severely beaten and suffers immense personal tragedy. It’s stuff that makes her come across as human and vulnerable instead of an invincible bore.
George Miller described himself as a feminist around the release of Mad Max: Fury Road, but one doesn’t get the impression from his work that he’s an agenda-pusher or even particularly political. Given that he’s pushing 80, the feminism Miller grew up around would’ve been the second-wave version. There were two strains of this feminism: the reasonable kind which aimed for equal opportunity of the sexes and the other kind that devolved into hardcore misandry — which is the root of some of the worst aspects of modern leftism.
I think it’s safe to assume that Miller hasn’t adopted the latter. His world of Mad Max is a brutal place for both men and women, which requires them to work together and see each other as equals. As she makes her way through the wasteland, Furiosa is taught by a new character named Praetorian Jack. Like her later partnership with Max Rockatansky, it’s an egalitarian one. Miller doesn’t belittle his male characters in Fury Road and Furiosa or make them useless in need of the better, faster, and stronger female character’s help — a modern storytelling trope I’m tired of seeing in films like The Last Jedi and the latest Indiana Jones.
So no, Furiosa is not woke. It simply came out at a time when enough people no longer trust studios to revive legacy IP and treat them with respect. George Miller’s lawsuit with Warner Bros. over unpaid earnings is the main reason why the film took so long to get made, when it really should have released a couple of years after Fury Road. But because it arrived after nearly a decade of uninspired Hollywood sequels, reboots, and remakes with tiresome political messaging, audiences don’t want to waste their money on yet another perceived dud even if Furiosa is actually worth seeing.
What’s Next?
Furiosa is probably going to cost Warner Bros. considerable financial losses, putting the future of Mad Max in jeopardy. The film is struggling just to break even, which is never a good sign. Its budget of $168 million isn’t the most expensive ever, but that’s still a considerable chunk of cash to spend on a niche spin-off to only a moderately successful franchise. Still, I don’t think that’s going to be the last word on Mad Max.
The strong reception among fans and critics will likely give Furiosa a second life on streaming and home video, ensuring that it continues to make some money back. Not to mention that it will probably take some awards for visual effects and makeup later in the year. If that campaign is successful, it may even return to cinemas in the future. Can you imagine a Fury Road/Furiosa double feature? It may not light the world on fire, but it would surely get at least some people to leave their houses and go to the cinema. The current trend of re-releasing old films for brand new anniversary screenings has been a surprise success, so let’s hope Fury Road gets one next year with Furiosa in tow.
Despite Mad Max not being a Star Wars or MCU-tier franchise, it’s clear that there are more new fans of these films than ever. The underrated video game has become somewhat of a cult classic and is regularly discounted through Steam sales. Considering that it and Furiosa share many similar concepts since their stories were developed at the same time, I have no doubt that the game will continue to introduce more people to the franchise. While nothing has been announced, a new video game would likely be successful. Furiosa was at one point even envisioned as a Japanese anime film, which shows that there is ample potential in other mediums to continue Mad Max.
George Miller has always been a big picture guy and his remarks over the years suggest that the story outline for his next planned entry, Mad Max: The Wasteland, is pretty much already done. It’s supposedly another prequel to Fury Road, but it will definitely bring back Max as the protagonist. Whether or not Tom Hardy will return after the tensions he brought to the set of Fury Road though is anyone’s guess and Miller has been somewhat coy when asked. Warner Bros. is probably not enthusiastic to start production on a new Mad Max film right away, so one can expect there to be a wait-and-see period before the cameras start rolling.
The way I see it, there are two ways the next Mad Max story can go down. Either give Miller a smaller budget and force him to do it more economically like in the old days or turn his proposed Wasteland film into a television series. Plans to bring Max to the small screen go back all the way to the 1990s, so it would not be an unreasonable proposal. The episodic format would give Miller ample room to flesh out his world even more than a two-and-a-half hour film, not to mention that Max going to new locations as a ronin-like figure would be perfect for weekly stories.
The elephant in the room is Miller’s age and if he would have the energy to direct such an adrenaline-pumping franchise as he enters his 80s. But if his overall career has proven anything, it’s that the man always takes his time with planning his work and doesn’t do something just for a quick buck. The fact that the director of Mad Max is also responsible for Babe, Happy Feet, The Witches of Eastwick, and Lorenzo’s Oil is a testament to how his flexible and eclectic mind works. I’m confident that he has at least one more Mad Max left in him, it’s only a question of format.
Foreign Perspectives is a reader-supported Substack. If you like my work and have come this far as a new reader or free subscriber, consider opting for a paid subscription so I can continue writing in-depth articles such as these on a regular basis. Your support is greatly appreciated!