Mad Max: it’s right there in the name. The original movie showed that Australians could make their own westerns. It featured the usual lone hero up against a violent immoral wasteland. And yet along the way it, like every ‘franchise’, was rebooted into a feminist paradigm. And then, like every rebooted franchise, it bombed.

‘Furiosa’ is struggling to pull ahead of Garfield, (a movie which somehow decided that the sleepy cat should get into a caper and that his dad should be played by Samuel L. Jackson), in one of the worst Memorial Day weekends on record.

The problem is right there in the title. Mad Max was never meant to be a Marvel-style ‘cinematic universe’ (no movie is) and its appeal came from a single lone rugged masculine hero. They got away with one stealth feminist reboot by keeping Mad Max in the title, but this time they didn’t and it’s all too obvious that the protagonist is a 90-pound young woman.

‘Furiosa’ ran into the same problem that all the failed feminist action movies, ‘Atomic Blonde’, ‘Ocean’s 8’, and the Ghostbusters reboot did. Men don’t want to see them and neither do women. So who are they for?

A movie like ‘Furiosa’ should have pulled in a whole lot of teenage boys. They stayed away.

Now ‘Furiosa’ will be lucky to beat Garfield. But whether it beats a cartoon can or not, it’s going to lose a ton of money which will hopefully kill the idea that Mad Max is meant to be another woke ‘cinematic universe’.