curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:
Well it's easy after the fact to say a hit movie had appeal, it's harder to guess before hand. A lot of people for example didn't have the Mario movie being a hit, even Barbie, I think it only dawned on some folkes about a few weeks before release that it was going to be a massive hit.
Godzilla Minus One made 116 million worldwide (56 million in the US) which is impressive given it's a Japanese language film with a small budget, but Furiosa has already made more than that or is about to.
Mad Max isn't really a hit franchise, even the Mel Gibson one's peaked with Beyond Thunderdome, and Beyond Thunderdome was the 18th biggest domestic grosser of 1985 below things like Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Fury Road, the franchise's "break out" wasn't even a top 20 worldwide hit for 2015, coming in below a flop like Terminator Genisys.
Mad Max is a niche franchise, if anything Fury Road probably overperformed as 2015 was a boom time for ticket sales and Charlize Theron was a fairly big star still.
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Hence my point; with ballooning budgets, you can't afford to sink it into something like a Mad Max spinoff.
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I think their logic was Mad Max Fury Road was basically a Furiosa movie anyway with Mad Max just tagging along.
With Theron and Hardy not getting along, I think they figured "hey well, we know the audience likes Furiosa, so lets make a Furiosa prequel where we don't have to deal with either actor".
Probably made some sense around 2017 or so on paper anyway.
Unfortunately for them they didn't realize the downturn the movie industry was headed for with COVID. I also don't think this movie really expands Furiosa's story all that much, we know already more or less she was abducted as a child from a paradise like area and we know already what happens regarding her quest to get back home. Furiosa as a movie really doesn't provide any great new twist on what we could already have assumed.
The concept just isn't good enough to justify a standalone movie. Knowing that Furiosa is not going to get back to her home also basically robs the story of any tension.
The market right now box office wise post COVID is brutal, I would say probably every movie today would make 25-30% more box office if it had been released pre-COVID. The nature of streaming and people not going to theaters for 18+ months really did a number on everything.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 05 June 2024