George Miller’s long-in-development Furiosa boasts an all-too-familiar narrative: an expensive labor of love struggling to make a commercial impact in an increasingly narrow entertainment landscape. The fifth entry in Miller’s Mad Max series, and a prequel to the acclaimed Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Furiosa opened to a disappointing box-office gross this past Memorial Day weekend, just barely beating out The Garfield Movie, and its return has precipitously dropped with each successive week. Though roughly half of Furiosa’s budget was subsidized by the Australian government, which makes the film’s break-even point lower than usual for a blockbuster of this scale, it’s clear that Miller’s latest picture has fallen below forecasted projections, even if it eventually turns a profit.
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