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‘Furiosa,’ ‘Garfield’ Lead Slowest Memorial Day Box Office in Decades

Cast member Anya Taylor-Joy attends the UK premiere of "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" in London, Britain, May 17, 2024. (Reuters)
Cast member Anya Taylor-Joy attends the UK premiere of "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" in London, Britain, May 17, 2024. (Reuters)
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‘Furiosa,’ ‘Garfield’ Lead Slowest Memorial Day Box Office in Decades

Cast member Anya Taylor-Joy attends the UK premiere of "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" in London, Britain, May 17, 2024. (Reuters)
Cast member Anya Taylor-Joy attends the UK premiere of "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" in London, Britain, May 17, 2024. (Reuters)

Movie theaters are looking more and more like a wasteland this summer. Neither “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” nor “The Garfield Movie” could save Memorial Day weekend, which is cruising towards a two-decade low.

“Furiosa,” the Mad Max prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, claimed the first place spot for the Friday-Saturday-Sunday weekend with $25.6 million, according to studio estimates on Sunday. Warner Bros. is waiting until Monday to release its four-day estimates.

“The Garfield Movie,” animated and family-friendly, was the other big new offering this weekend from Sony’s Columbia Pictures and Alcon Entertainment. It is claiming No. 1 for the four-day holiday weekend with an estimated $31.9 million in ticket sales through Memorial Day. Sony estimates its three-day earnings to be $24.8 million.

Aside from Memorial Day in 2020 when theaters were closed due to COVID-19, these are the lowest earning No. 1 movies in 29 years, since “Casper” earned $22.5 million (not adjusted for inflation) in its first four days in 1995. Big earners are more typical for the holiday weekend, which has had ten movies crack $100 million, led by “Top Gun: Maverick’s” record-setting $160 million launch in 2022.

Last year, the live-action “The Little Mermaid” joined the group with a $118 million debut. Audiences even turned out in greater numbers over the pandemic-addled weekend in 2021 for “A Quiet Place Part II,” which made over $57 million.

“Furiosa” was never expected to join the $100 million opener club, which Warner Bros. released on 3,804 screens in the US and Canada. But it was supposed to have a slightly stronger showing in the $40 million range over its first four days. That would have been more in line with its predecessor, “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which opened to $45.4 million in May 2015. “Fury Road,” starring Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy, went on to gross nearly $380 million worldwide.

This new origin story in which Taylor-Joy plays a younger version of Theron’s character had a lot of things going for it, too, including strong reviews out of the just-wrapped Cannes Film Festival (it has an 89% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a splashy international press tour with many buzzy premiere looks from Taylor-Joy. With a reported $168 million production budget, not accounting for marketing and promotion, “Furiosa” has a long road to profitability.

“The Garfield Movie,” meanwhile, was more modestly budgeted, at a reported $60 million. Chris Pratt voices the lasagna-loving, Monday-hating orange cat in the movie that got scathing reviews from critics (it has a 37% on Rotten Tomatoes). Audiences meanwhile gave both “Furiosa” and “The Garfield Movie” a B+ CinemaScore and 4.5 stars out of 5 on PostTrak.

In its second weekend, John Krasinski’s “IF” fell 53%, adding $16 million through Sunday and $20.7 million through Monday, bringing its domestic total to $63.3 million. Worldwide, it has surpassed $100 million. “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” now in its third weekend, added $13.4 million through Sunday, bringing its global total to $294.8 million, making it the fourth-highest grossing film of the year.

Earlier this week, the industry trade The Hollywood Reporter asked “what happened to the $100 million opener?” Notably, 2023 has had none yet. The biggest of the year was “Dune: Part Two,” which opened to $82.5 million and went on to earn over $711 million worldwide.

The lack of a recent runaway hit just puts more pressure on the upcoming films to make up the slack. Still on the way are a slew of potential blockbusters like Paramount’s “A Quiet Place: Day One” (June 27), Universal’s “Despicable Me 4” (July 3) and “Twisters” (July 19) and two heavy-hitters from Disney: “Inside Out 2” (June 14) and “Deadpool & Wolverine” (July 26).

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When Did Disney Villains Stop Being So Villainous? New Show Suggests They May Just Be Misunderstood

An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
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When Did Disney Villains Stop Being So Villainous? New Show Suggests They May Just Be Misunderstood

An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)

Cruella de Vil wanted to turn Dalmatian puppies into fur coats, Captain Hook tried to bomb Peter Pan and Maleficent issued a curse of early death for Aurora.

But wait, maybe these Disney villains were just misunderstood? That's the premise of a new musical show at Walt Disney World that has some people wondering: When did Disney's villains stop wanting to be so ... villainous?

The live show, "Disney Villains: Unfairly Ever After," debuts May 27 at Disney's Hollywood Studios park at the Orlando, Florida, resort. In the show, the three baddies of old-school Disney movies plead their cases before an audience that they are the most misunderstood villains of them all.

"We wanted to tell a story that's a little different than what's been told before: Which one of them has been treated the most unfairly ever after?" Mark Renfrow, a creative director of the show, said in a promotional video.

That hook - the narrative kind, not the captain - is scratching some Disney observers the wrong way.

"I think it's wonderful when you still have stories where villains are purely villainous," said Benjamin Murphy, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Florida State University's campus in Panama. "When you have villains reveling in their evil, it can be amusing and satisfying."

Disney has some precedent for putting villains in a sympathetic light, or at least explaining how they got to be so evil. The 2021 film, "Cruella," for instance, presents a backstory for the dog-hater played by actor Emma Stone that blames her villainy on her birth mother never wanting her.

Other veins of pop culture have rethought villains too, perhaps none more famously than the book, theatrical musical and movie versions of "Wicked," the reinterpretation of the Wicked Witch of the West character from "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

The blockbuster success of "Wicked, " which was based on the 1995 novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West," sparked the trend of rethinking villains in popular entertainment, Murphy said.

"With trends like that, the formula is repeated and repeated until it's very predictable: Take a villain and make them sympathetic," he said.

The centuries-old fairy tales upon which several Disney movies are based historically were meant to teach children a lesson, whether it was not to get close to wolves (Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs) or trust strange, old women in the woods (Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel).

But they often made marginalized people into villains - older women, people of color or those on the lower socioeconomic scale, said Rebecca Rowe, an assistant professor of children's literature at Texas A&M University-Commerce.

The trend toward making villains more sympathetic started in the late 1980s and 1990s as children's media took off. There was a desire to present villains in a manner that was more complicated and less black and white, as there was an overall cultural push toward emphasizing acceptance, she said.

"The problem is everyone has swung so hard into that message, that we have kind of lost the villainous villains," Rowe said. "There is value in the villainous villains. There are people who just do evil things. Sometimes there is a reason for it, but sometimes not. Just because there is a reason doesn't mean it negates the harm."

Whether it's good for children to identify with villains is complicated. There is a chance they adopt the villains' traits if it's what they identify with, but then some scholars believe it's not a bad thing for children to empathize with characters who often are part of marginalized communities, Rowe said.

The Disney villains also tend to appeal to adults more than children. They also appreciate the villains' campiness, with some "Disney princesses" gladly graduating into "evil queens."

Erik Paul, an Orlando resident who has had a year-round pass to Disney World for the past decade, isn't particularly fond of the villains, but understands why Disney would want to frame them in a more sympathetic light in a show dedicated just to them.

"I know friends who go to Hollywood Studios mainly to see the villain-related activities," Paul said. "Maybe that's why people like the villains because they feel misunderstood as well, and they feel a kinship to the villains."