George Miller's critically-acclaimed Mad Max: Fury Road raced into theaters last night and began its box office weekend spring with a rock-solid $3.7 million. The Warner Bros.Time Warner release comes courtesy of Village Roadshow and Rat Pac at a cost of $150m. It is the continuation of Miller's legendary and groundbreaking apocalyptic action saga that spanned three films (Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) in 1979, 1982, and 1985 respectively. They turned Miller into an action icon and turned Mel Gibson into a movie star. Gibson isn't around this time, mostly because the last Mad Max movie was thirty years ago. Tom Hardy has taken over the title role. The film was always going to play to the fans and old-school action junkies, but the question is whether it would appeal to general moviegoers here and abroad.
The picture is opening in much of the worldwide market this weekend, so we'll have a pretty good idea of its overall fate by Sunday. Anyway, the film has been riding high on eye-popping buzz thanks to eye-popping reviews thanks to the movie's eye-popping quality. And I can speak with anecdotal evidence that the general ticket buyers are expressing their satisfaction accordingly. The film also garnered loads of free publicity thanks to its surprisingly feminist leanings. Charlize Theron is the film's true central character, and that fact among other things led to cries of protest from various Men's Rights Activist type organizations. I don't necessarily love giving said schmucks a platform for the sake of feeling morally superior (the nation still awaits Charlize Theron's "perfect response"), but that's a conversation for another day.
Point being, this is arguably a rare case where the surprisingly superb reviews and the white-hot buzz will hopefully affect the opening weekend number in a positive fashion (think Gravity or John Wick). We all like to talk about how blockbusters are critic-proof, but rave reviews help a big movie. Okay, we've got that $4 million Thursday number, what does it mean for the weekend? Well, the easy answer is that Fury Road does a "typical" 10% of its weekend take last night and ends the frame with an encouraging $37m in a manner similar to Pacific Rim ($37.5m weekend/$3.6m Thursday). The pessimistic answer is that it plays like a teen boy-friendly version of The Fault in Our Stars ($48m/$8m) and ends up with $25m for the weekend having expanded most of its fanbase on Thursday and Friday. That's unlikely, but I'm throwing it out there.
The (also unlikely) best case scenario is that it plays like World War Z, which earned $3.6m on Thursday and eventually roared to a $66m weekend. That's a 5.4% take, which is what "big" but not sequel/frontloaded movies used to do on Thursday/midnight. But Tom Hardy is not Brad Pitt, so I'm guessing something between those two extremes. Mad Max: Fury Road has earned $3.7 million in Thursday previews, which puts the likely opening weekend between $31m and $46m. I'm not ruling out the buzz driving business upward all weekend, but Pitch Perfect 2 will be a big obstacle regardless of which film tops the weekend charts. If you've been living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland for the last week, you should know that the movie is fantastic and it's absolutely worth your time, your money, and the extra hassle of a babysitter. See it in 2D, see it in IMAX 3D, heck see it in D-Box if you have the constitution for it. We'll know soon enough as to whether or not it will be a lovely weekend.
