George Miller’s Furiosa may be struggling in cinemas, but that doesn’t mean it won’t ultimately make money for Warner Bros. A few thoughts on the modern approach to box office reporting:
There’s a sense of ‘here we again’, as headlines emerge about George Miller’s latest movie, Furiosa.
Off the back of terrific reviews, the fifth film in the Mad Max saga arrived in cinemas with the promise of a sixth movie – The Borderlands – ready to go. George Miller said as much in his collection of pre-release interviews, the assumption being that Warner Bros would fire the starting gun should Furiosa’s box office receipts be solid enough.
Yet, as you likely know, the numbers aren’t looking good. The chances of Mad Max 6 are beginning to look incredibly slim.
By the time it’s completed its cinema run, the film’s looking at a worldwide gross of around $200m – more likely just shy of that. IMAX screens have now been handed over to Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, and a report is suggesting that Furiosa will lose Warner Bros in the region of $200m (the film has cost around $160m to make, before marketing and distribution).
Which it absolutely won’t, but I’ll come to that in a second.
Initially, I want to acknowledge that it’s quite dispiriting to see such a strong, physical, cinematic film be eschewed by cinemagoers. People want good films. Someone makes a good film. Not enough people go and see it. See also: The Fall Guy, also released this summer.
But also, appreciating hindsight is easy, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was always going to be a relatively tough sell. An R-rated action film that’s a prequel to a hugely acclaimed movie, which itself did well, but didn’t crack $400m worldwide on its cinema takings. Few were expecting a billion dollars when Furiosa came out, but even so.
In fact, apply some modern day box office reporting to Mad Max: Fury Road, and that film – which cost $150m at least to make – is barely in profit anyway.
However: why would the notably spreadsheet-driven Warner Bros Discovery – a studio hardly shy about getting rid of things that it thinks won’t make it money – decide to press ahead with the film if that were the case? Maybe there’s just a bit more to blockbuster movie accounting than we’re led to believe. And maybe – just whisper it – the initial box office isn’t the be all and end all.
Read more: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review | An odyssey of blood and oil
Appreciating we’re in an era where Hollywood studios are driven by quarterly reports, and a short-term approach to the life cycle of a film, instant accounting is not the full measure of a film’s income. What’s changed in the last decade or two is the corporate-driven culture of modern studios requires a determination as to whether something is a hit or miss inside a much shorter window. But cinema is scattered with examples of films that took their time to find an audience. Not every film finds an instant audience. Most of them, though, keep on earning something, long after the accountants have moved on.
At the top end of this? Go back to 1999, when David Fincher’s Fight Club proved an expensive box office disappointment to 20th Century Fox (enjoyably much to the annoyance of Rupert Murdoch). As much as that film may have made Fox a loss in the short term, in the 25 years since, it’s continued to sell. It’s been on disc multiple times, it’s been sold as part of packages of movies to television stations, it appears on streaming, it keeps selling as a digital download. It’s a high-profile example, certainly, but in the ensuing years, there’s no way that Fox hasn’t seen a handsome return on its investment, even if that return goes to the Disney empire now.
Any studio-made film will, over time, continue to earn. In the 2010s, Disney issued profit warnings over movies such as The Lone Ranger, Tomorrowland and John Carter, and while they each undoubtedly stumbled at the box office on their original release, each of them also has enjoyed plenty of airings since. While Disney may have looked at initial write-downs for its three-monthly and annual reports, realistically, those films have each individually at worse pretty much broken even. They’ve not done the intended megabucks the studio would have wanted, but outside of the apparently most important audience for a modern studio – shareholders – there’s little reason to lose sleep.
I’ve always agreed with a point filmmaker Kevin Smith once made, that it’s not for the audience to worry about box office. We’re not big companies, we’re not the ones who get millions when a film hits, and have to pay out millions when it doesn’t. We get to watch it, we might watch it more than once, and in the case of the Gerard Butler-headlined Plane, dammit, we might be tempted to buy the T-shirt too.
The bit where I slightly disagree with his point is that we all know the game: we know that Hollywood works on, well, what financially works. Or as the rules narrow, what financially works in the short term. On last year’s numbers, it’s unsurprising that the success of Barbie has led to films based on Mattel products getting a fresh injection of energy. Conversely, the inclination to make a sixth Indiana Jones film – or something similar to it – must be long, long gone. Hits generate clones, commercial failures have the opposite effect. The worry on our side of the fence is the fact that Furiosa hasn’t made megabucks will temper the inclination of a studio to take a punt on something similar, whether it’s got Mad Max in the title or not.
Yet that doesn’t temper the core fact at the heart of this: in five to ten years’ time, without the lens of Hollywood accounting involved, I’d be genuinely amazed if Furiosa loses Warner Bros money. The fact it’s part of a franchise means it’s going to add a few quid to boxset sales anyway, but even beyond that: organically, people will keep finding this film. They just will.
It doesn’t make as interesting a headline, granted, but Furiosa's legacy isn’t sealed by three weeks of box office takings. I can’t spin that the numbers aren’t disappointing. But don’t worry: Warner Bros Discovery will still be having a Christmas party this year…
