Garfield & Furiosa's Week 2 Box Office Race Is Tight As Mad Max Prequel Survives Dip

The Garfield Movie pulled ahead of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga as their neck-and-neck box office race continued into week 2. The former’s domestic opening and the latter’s worldwide opening took place over Memorial Day, which led to a neck-and-neck race for box office dominance during the three-day holiday weekend. Eventually, the Furiosa box office took No. 1 with a 4-day total of $32.3 million, trailed by Garfield at $31.3 million, but it was too close to call until Monday, an unusually tight race for a modern domestic box office weekend.

Per Variety, The Garfield Movie is closing out its second weekend in domestic theaters with a 3-day total of $14 million. Although both titles are still performing with similarly middling results, it has pulled ahead of Furiosa, which has fallen to No. 3 with $10.7 million. This marks a roughly 59% drop for Furiosa, which is reasonably solid for a major blockbuster in week 2, though Garfield‘s much slimmer 42% drop is what has caused this discrepancy between the titles.

Underwhelming Holdovers Dominate The Top 5 With Garfield & Furiosa

IF And The Fall Guy Fill Out The Chart Despite Lukewarm Box Office

The first weekend in June featured a dearth of new wide-release movies, none of which reached the Top 5, though the new anime title Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle hit No. 6. As such, the domestic Top 5 contains the exact same titles as Memorial Day weekend, with the only major change being Furiosa and IF swapping chart positions. Overall, the domestic box office made just $67.4 million this weekend, which is down 67% from the same weekend in 2023, which saw the release of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. See the full domestic Top 5 below:

On top of that overall number, the state of the Top 5 doesn’t spell particularly good news for the domestic box office. Of the other three movies filling out the chart, only one, the No. 4 title, can be considered a bona fide hit. The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes box office makes it one of the only proper hits of the summer so far, as it has earned $337 million worldwide and become the fourth highest-grossing movie of the year behind Kung Fu Panda 4, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and Dune: Part Two.

IF overtaking Furiosa doesn’t necessarily mean that it is doing well in and of itself. The movie cost $110 million and has so far has just barely made its production budget back worldwide. In a similar vein, The Fall Guy, which has almost the exact same cumulative domestic gross as IF, cost an estimated $150 million and is similarly struggling to earn much higher than that number at the global box office. Both underwhelming titles remaining in the Top 5 for so long shows how weak the overall domestic box office has been in recent weeks.

Which Movie Is Doing Better, Furiosa Or Garfield?

Both Movies Have Different Box Office Targets

Although The Garfield Movie is pulling ahead of the Furiosa release, it remains to be seen if either movie can ultimately be considered a hit by the end of their runs. This will ultimately depend on their overall worldwide totals and their production budgets. Because theaters keep half of ticket sales, generally a movie’s break-even point is at least twice its production budget, though that number doesn’t account for marketing costs. Below, see how close both movies’ cumulative domestic totals (using the Saturday projections) have come to hitting that point so far:

Although the weekend’s full numbers for international markets won’t come in until later in the weekend, the Garfield release has been playing overseas since the beginning of May and it has already earned an estimated $152 million worldwide. Furiosa, which opened worldwide over Memorial Day weekend, only earned $32.8 million internationally in its first week. With those confirmed numbers, the Mad Max prequel has not hit its break-even point yet, though it seems more or less inevitable that Garfield‘s international weekend has easily pushed it past $120 million worldwide.

The fact that both movies had such lukewarm domestic week 2 performances in a weekend with no major competitive new wide releases likely isn’t a great sign for their continued domestic performance throughout the summer. However, if The Garfield Movie maintains a consistent week-over-week hold, it will very likely zoom toward becoming a solid hit in short order. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, on the other hand, has a much longer journey ahead of it considering its enormous budget.

Source: Variety

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  Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

  

  A prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa is an action-adventure film that tells the origin story of the headstrong and fearless Furiosa. Set shortly after the beginning of the “end of the world,” Furiosa is kidnapped and brought before a powerful warlord, now forced to work for him. To find her way back home, Furiosa will adapt to the new harsh and arid world as she grows into the Furiosa she becomes known to be. 

  Runtime

  148 minutes

  Director

  George Miller

  Release Date

  May 24, 2024

  Studio(s)

  Warner Bros. Pictures

  Distributor(s)

  Warner Bros. Pictures

  Writers

  George Miller , Nick Lathouris

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  The Garfield Movie

  

  Based on Jim Davis’s comic series, Garfield is a new imagining of the lasagna-loving cat and his friends, opting for a fully computer-animated approach. Chris Pratt voices the titular cat, with the film aiming to explore his early days and new misadventures for him, his friends, and his family.

  Runtime

  101 minutes

  Director

  Mark Dindal

  Release Date

  May 24, 2024

  Studio(s)

  Columbia Pictures , Alcon Entertainment , DNEG Animation , Amuse Entertainment , Paws, Inc.

  Distributor(s)

  Sony Pictures Releasing

  Writers

  David Reynolds

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