Over the long weekend, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos got a bit of a roasting for telling the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro that Barbie and Oppenheimer, whose combined global box office was $2.4 billion, “would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.” It’s easy to chuckle at Sarandos’ comments, as it was when Zack Snyder told Joe Rogan that his movie Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child of Fire pulled in more viewers than Greta Gerwig’s theatrical smash. But as Sarandos’ interview was being mocked around the internet, movie theaters were experiencing their worst Memorial Day weekend in decades, led, just barely, by an underwhelming start for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Little more than a week after the prequel to the beloved Mad Max: Fury Road debuted to awestruck reviews at Cannes, the film edged out Garfield to win the weekend with a four-day haul of $32 million at the domestic box office, which was a far less robust showing than industry experts had predicted, and well short of its predecessor’s $45 million opening. Meanwhile, according to Netflix’s figures, more than 28 million viewers worldwide celebrated the holiday by firing up Atlas, in which Jennifer Lopez is a scientist who defends Earth from annihilation by a terrorist artificial intelligence played by Simu Liu. Vive le cinéma!
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