Memorial Day weekend is typically big business at the box office but it’s a bust in 2024.
Box office sales this weekend were the worst in decades, a huge blow to the film industry which has been struggling for a few years now.
Millions of people have simply walked away from new movies over Hollywood’s embrace of wokeness and movies that seek to preach rather than entertain.
The Washington Examiner reports:
Memorial Day box office showing softest since the 1990s
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.
John Nolte of Breitbart News says the problem is the movies themselves:
Furiosa is shaping up to be a financial catastrophe. It cost $168 million to produce, so let’s call it an even $200 million with promotion costs (which might be generous). That puts break-even at around $400 million. The global take this weekend is a dreadful $59 million.
So what went wrong?
The answer is what’s been going wrong with Hollywood for the last five years… It’s not the pandemic. It’s not the strike. It’s not a lack of product. The problem is the product—the product sucks ass.
Hollywood is going to continue to struggle until they learn this lesson.
People go to the movies to be entertained, not for progressive political lectures.
