Director Wes Ball urges everyone to go see the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Directed and co-written by acclaimed filmmaker George Miller, this post-apocalyptic action film, which serves as the fifth installment in the extensive Mad Max franchise, tells the origin story of the fearless and strong-willed Imperator Furiosa. Despite garnering largely positive reviews from critics, it’s box office performance has been underwhelming.

Wes Ball, the director behind the widely successful Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, took to his X (Twitter) account, to express his thoughts about Furiosa.

The 43-year-old claims that the reported $168M production budget is not accurate, and he suggests that the movie would have cost even more to produce. He further states that the movie is a huge creative swing and urges people to head to the cinema to see it for themselves.

Why Is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Struggling At The Box Office?

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Since the inception of the Mad Max franchise, the film series has generally been a hit at theaters. The first movie was a resounding commercial success, grossing over $100 million worldwide on a tiny budget of $400,000, and setting the record for the most profitable film to have been released. This set the tone for the subsequent entries in the franchise which have also seen huge success, especially Mad Max: Fury Road (the highest grossing movie in the franchise), which built up expectations for Furiosa.

While Furiosa was undoubtedly one of the year’s most anticipated movies, the movie only grossed between $31-33 million domestically, falling well short of its predecessor’s success in the same timeframe. There have been several reasons why Furiosa isn’t performing so well in the theaters, and high up on the list is the fact that, for the first time ever, Furiosa does not focus on the Mad Max character which might explain why turnout has been low.

Additionally, since the COVID-19 pandemic struck a few years ago, the time between when a movie lands in the theaters and when it becomes available on digital is increasingly getting shorter. The shorter wait time is causing many audiences to wait for digital releases rather than go to the cinema and when you couple this with the aforementioned reason, it explains the movie’s poor performance at the box office. Regardless, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga might still experience an uptick in sales, and it’s still a little too early to call if it will end up like its predecessors or become the first box office flop in the Mad Max franchise.

Source: Wes Ball /X (Twitter)