The endless but nonetheless hilarious humiliations just keep coming for Furiosa, AKA Mad Max with a Sexless Girlboss.
First, this $200 million act of stupidity that dropped a sexless girl into a Mad Max movie flopped on Memorial Day Weekend. Then Furiosa was responsible for driving the Memorial Day Weekend box office to a 26-year low. Then, without any new competition, Furiosa came in third place in week two behind two children’s movies — Garfield and If. Mad Max with a Sexless Girlboss is dying at the domestic box office (still hasn’t topped $50 million after two weekends), dying at the worldwide box office (only $114 million after two weekends), and now we’re told this bomb is killing off an entire movie theatre.
“Stephen Goddard, the manager of Emerald Cinema Complex in [Emerald, Queensland], sold just 222 tickets to” Furiosa during its opening week, the Daily Mail reported. He says that these “disastrous numbers could spell the end of his 20-year business.”
He explained that a movie people actually want to see “would usually sell 1050 tickets in a week,” so he “will probably shut down.”
“Back in 2006 to 2009,” he said, “the top movies sold 4500 – 5000 seats, We did 66,000 seats all through that period. We will do possibly 30,000 seats this year if we are lucky.”
“We will probably shut down, quite truthfully,” he added, “and I know that Mount Isa [cinema] is in the same boat. I have spoken to them and they are looking at it.”
You produce a Mad Max movie without Mad Max, and then, instead of making the character of Furiosa a hot babe with some sex appeal, the filmmakers took a lovely actress with sex appeal, shaved her head, and gave her the body of a 14-year-old boy.
Who wants to watch that?
Well, at the Emerald Cinema Complex in Queensland, not even 223 people.
Dune 2, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Barbie, and Super Mario Bros. have all been blockbusters, which prove that if Hollywood makes movies people want to see, people will come out to see them.
Deadpool and Wolverine will almost certainly make a fortune because it’s being advertised as a movie where cool guys do cool things around hot-looking women. Honestly, this is not a difficult formula. If you want to make money by putting on a great show, have cool guys do cool things around hot chicks. That formula of wish fulfillment-plus-sex appeal has packed them in for a hundred years.
When I want to see a new movie I don’t watch a new movie. New movies are almost all shit. A new movie to me is now a movie from the past I haven’t seen, especially foreign movies. And even though they’re not in English, they still speak to me because the human condition is universal.
Today’s movies don’t explore the human condition. Instead they violate our common humanity by pretending we’re all gay or obsessed with identity or see narcissism as a moral good. Normal People cannot relate to that. Self-expression and self-fulfillment are a dark form of wish-fulfillment for the shallow and smug. Stoic and brave self-sacrifice (i.e., heroism) is a form of wish-fulfillment that appeals to our better angels. But according to Hollywood, only toxic men engage in that.
It’s all morally upside-down, so I’ve joined the 99 percent and stopped watching.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
