Box office offerings for Memorial Day weekend returned the lowest numbers in nearly three decades, with even the simultaneous releases of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “The Garfield Movie” failing to draw in enough viewers to match past holiday weekends.
Per CNN, total box office sales for the long weekend topped out at just $128.3 million, compared to 2023’s $205 million. The current record for Memorial Day weekend was set in 2013, when moviegoers spent a combined $314.3 million, primarily on that year’s blockbusting “Fast & Furious 6.” The next-lowest performance for this same time period was in 1995, with top-billed “Casper” bringing in just over $117 million.
Leading into Memorial Day, expectations were high given the back-to-back openings of two anticipated films. “Furiosa,” the star-studded prequel to 2015’s award-winning hit “Mad Max: Fury Road,” exceeded studio goals with ticket presales, but ultimately only pulled in $32 million against a budget of $168 million. “The Garfield Movie,” an animated family flick starring Chris Pratt as the titular lasagna-loving, Monday-hating cat, did proportionately better, making just over $31 million against a production budget of $60 million.
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“This was a rather slow Memorial weekend,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “A few things didn’t happen that created this situation: We didn’t have a tailwind heading into the summer. We kicked off the summer minus a Marvel movie. In a way, we’ve been playing catch up all year long.”
“There’s no way to sugarcoat it, the numbers that are coming out this weekend are nothing to write home about,” he continued. “Summer is the most important moviegoing season of the year, accounting on average for nearly 40% of the total domestic annual revenue, so as goes the summer so goes the year.”
In addition to the underwhelming numbers from “Furiosa” and “Garfield,” John Krasinski’s “IF” fell 53 percent in its second weekend. Meanwhile, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” now in its third weekend, made an additional $13.4 million, bringing its worldwide haul up to $294.8 million—the fourth highest-grossing film of the year.
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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