Box Office: 'Mad Max: Fury Road' Scores Lovely $45.45M Weekend

Mad Max: Fury Road didn't top the weekend box office in its debut frame, but it's still a winner. The $150 million sci-fi action spectacular earned a superb $45.45 million over its Fri-Sun bow. It's one of those odd situations where a film debuts right in line with realistic expectations and/or tracking guestimates, and yet finds itself on the defense because the film turned out to be better than expected. After all, Mad Max: Fury Road was looking at a $40m+ debut a month ago, before the overwhelmingly positive reviews rolled in. So obviously that should mean a bump in the weekend figures right?  Obviously that was not the case, although we shouldn't assume that the rave reviews didn't merely assure a strong $40m+ even in the shadow of Pitch Perfect 2's peak-level bow. The film ended up right where it was expected to, and since that's a pretty strong result in-and-of-itself, that has to qualify as a win. If it has a small drop next weekend, which it very well may with the Memorial Day weekend as a buffer, then we can talk about the reviews and the word-of-mouth.

As I'm assuming you know, Village Roadshow and Rat Pac Entertainment's 's Mad Max: Fury Road is the fourth film in George Miller's post-apocalyptic desert action series, with Tom Hardy taking over for Mel Gibson thirty years after the last installment. The big surprises are A) how terrific the movie turned out to be and B) that it's a female-centric action adventure film with Charlize Theron as the lead and the primary action figure. The film opened in 68 overseas markets this weekend and earned an additional $65m overseas for a robust $109.4m worldwide in its first weekend.Warner basically did everything they could short of giving away all the good parts in order to sell the film. They had the film of course, and they cut some eye-popping trailers that truly made this film feel one-of-a-kind, and they screened it early enough to build critical buzz.

Heck, they even let the embargo drop a day earlier than intended when they saw the writing on the wall and noticed critics like me desperate to tell the world how wonderful this film was. I have to wonder if Warner made the right call opening the female-centric sci-fi fable against Pitch Perfect 2. They had to know that the film would get buzz based on its surprisingly non-patriarchal leanings, and this feels not unlike Fox cutting Live Free or Die Hard to a PG-13 to get the kids but then opening it against Pixar's Ratatouille. That Mad Max played 70% male and Pitch Perfect 2 played 75% female is a little disheartening, but them's the breaks and a hit is a hit is a hit. Also, Mad Max: Fury Road played 46% under-35 years old, 73% under 50, and 46% 3D

Hindsight and all, but there is going to be a surprising amount of female-centric fare this summer, with Tomorrowland dropping next weekend and (the somewhat fantastic) Spy dropping on June 5th, which means a push towards females after opening weekend may be a challenge. Of course, having a summer season filled with high profile female options is not a problem Hollywood is used to having. And truth be told, as much as I loved the movie, I don't particularly care if it becomes a big hit. I don't particularly need to see a new trilogy of Mad Max movies and it's hard for me to root too much for a film whose success will mostly inspire Hollywood to further raid their franchise vaults for decades-old properties to revive.

I'm certainly not rooting for it to fail because I like when good movies do well at the box office. But it's not like its theoretical underperformance down the line will have any bad lessons since it's such a unique cocktail of elements unlikely to be replicated in the future. And even if Hollywood doesn't necessarily learn the best lessons from its surprise triumphs, filmmakers certainly do and I can be optimistic and presume that 70-year old George Miller just challenged an entire generation of genre filmmakers on everything from quality of action to practical effects and realism-enhancing CGI to gender parity. In the meantime, it's a great movie, and I heartily recommend seeing it in theaters, be it 2D, IMAX 3D, or D-Box. And for the record, this one could easily have gone the way of Dredd and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. That it didn't just play to the geeks and may well become a worldwide blockbuster counts as a major win for the Warner Bros. marketing department.