Why Anya Taylor-Joy's Mad Max prequel lost $120m – and why it doesn't matter
Hollywood box office reports can be a disconcerting read for anyone who thinks they understand basic maths. This week, the film industry website Deadline offered up a belter. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which cost $168 million to produce and which made $211m across cinemas, DVD and streaming, somehow still managed to lose $119.6m.
The unfortunate (and, on the face of it, inexplicable) figures were revealed in Deadline's annual Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament, which ranks the profitability of the highest-profile theatrical releases in the last calendar year.
The biggest winner of 2023 was Disney Pixar's Inside Out 2, which took $650m after all bills were paid, followed by Disney Animation's Moana 2 with $415m and Disney Marvel's Deadpool & Wolverine with $400m. In this era of perpetual industry-wide crisis, one particular studio clearly isn't going to have the bailiffs at the door for a bit.
But the Furiosa numbers are especially depressing: by Deadline's calculations, only Joker: Folie à Deux, with its vast production costs and negligible US takings, fared worse. Per the data, Furiosa sunk into the red because Warner Bros' outlay on the project – one blockbuster budget, plus a $108m ad campaign to support it – assumed another Fury Road-sized success would result.
But both in the US and internationally, turnout was barely half of what it had been for that now-canonised 2015 predecessor – despite comparably strong reviews and an identical B+ CinemaScore, a stat that reveals the extent to which films meet their opening-night crowd's expectations.
So why did the revving legions of Fury Road heads steer clear? The answer – or rather answers – lie in the wider circumstances around the film's release, as well as key creative choices which may have benefitted the film itself (which, to be clear, was one of last year's very best) but only served to dissuade potential viewers from riding eternal, shiny and chrome, or just taking the bus, to their local multiplex.
May 2024 was, it transpired, a dreadful time to launch a new movie. America's Memorial Day holiday, the long weekend ending on the last Monday in May, has long been considered a prime site to pitch early summer blockbusters: this year's line-up includes the latest Mission: Impossible and Lilo & Stitch, while Fury Road itself took the slot in 2015.
But last year's Memorial Day takings were the feeblest in 26 years, thanks to a thinner release schedule due to the 2023 strikes and a growing awareness that studios were bundling their output onto streaming faster than ever. (Action-comedy The Fall Guy appeared on premium VOD services that very weekend, less than three weeks after opening in cinemas.) Additionally, the majority of premium large format screens – Imax, 4K, Dolby Atmos and the like – had been block-booked by Sony for the early June release of Bad Boys: Ride or Die, which gave George Miller's film less than two weeks to be seen in the best possible light.
Against that backdrop, Furiosa had to work far harder than its predecessor to quickly pull a crowd. But its stars, Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, weren't the tried-and-true draws that Fury Road's Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron had been nine years earlier, while the film's prequel status meant it had no Max to offer audiences – nor the version of Furiosa they'd come to know last time around.
Perhaps most damaging of all, the series' signature we-shot-this-for-real sales pitch had been fatally undermined by an early trailer, whose gaudy palette and unfinished visual effects suggested the whole thing would be an airless CG-drenched trifle, rather than the dust-blown action folk-epic Miller had actually made.
Does its commercial failure matter? It certainly seems to have done for the 80-year-old Miller, whose proposed final Mad Max film, another prequel subtitled The Wasteland, hasn't been talked about much since Furiosa's release. And at a tough time for ambitious directors with strong pop sensibilities who aren't called Christopher Nolan, it may make studios even more reluctant to back projects that sit outside the ever-tightening circle of approved IPs.
But as far as the film itself goes, Furiosa remains as electrifying as it always obviously was. Far from a money-grubbing trundle back down Fury Road, it's one of the current decade's greatest and most unique blockbusters; an adrenalised collection of legends and lays with their roots coiled deep round silent cinema and ancient myth.
Its centrepiece chase, with Tom Burke's dusky Praetorian Jack at the wheel of a war rig and Taylor-Joy's Furiosa clinging to its undercarriage, is the equal of any of Fury Road's mobile battles – the truck is besieged from all sides, including above, by paragliding bandits propelled by industrial fans and lobbing dynamite tipped spears.
The plot surrounding it isn't nearly as streamlined as its predecessor's, but comes out in a whispery, Eddaic tumble. It's like listening to campfire stories hauled back through time from beyond the apocalypse, as Chris Hemsworth's Dementus leads multiple raids against the Immortan and his clan, while watching the girl he once made an orphan grow into the only warrior capable of facing him down. Miller's command of early cinema technique makes the whole thing an effortless watch. Yes, it's frenzied in places, but Buster Keaton comedies were too – and like those silent classics, Miller's mayhem has a grace that's missing from almost every other film made today on this scale.
Its streaming availability shifts from month to month and place to place, but in the UK it's currently available to watch on NOW and Sky. If you missed it, have a look this weekend, then apply a vigorous kick to your former self's behind for not catching it on the big screen.
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