


Hollywood’s hopes for a hot start to the summer at the box office fizzled out Monday, with Memorial Day long weekend movie ticket sales poised to be the softest in almost three decades.
Warner Bros.’s Furiosa beat out Sony’s Columbia Pictures and Alcon Entertainment’s The Garfield Movie, according to Comscore data. But the Mad Max prequel’s $32 million domestic opening weekend was the Memorial Day weekend’s worst No. 1 performance since 1995’s Casper, with $22.5 million, not adjusted for inflation and excluding 2020, when theaters were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In comparison, Disney‘s live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid opened last year with $118 million over the holiday, and Paramount Picture’s Top Gun: Maverick launched with $160 million 12 months before that. Even Furiosa’s predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Road, opened with $45 million in 2015.
The disappointing results have been partly attributed to last year’s strikes, which stopped production for months and delayed the likes of Disney’s Deadpool & Wolverine from May to late July. Additionally, Disney’s Lion King origin story, Mufasa, won’t come out in cinemas until December, and Paramount’s eighth Mission: Impossible won’t come out until next year. That meant there was was no comic book film to kickoff the summer as has become tradition, as well as no momentum heading into the season.
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Although there has not been a $100 million opener this year, few promising films are still to debut, including Paramount’s A Quiet Place: Day One, Universal’s Despicable Me 4 and Twisters, and Disney’s Inside Out 2 and the aforementioned Deadpool & Wolverine.
Moviegoers are projected to spend $3 billion this summer, short of last year’s $4 billion, driven by Warner Bros.’s Barbie and Universal’s Oppenheimer.