Fur slick with blood and gore, Garfield triumphs over a wounded Furiosa

In a scene eerily reminiscent of the climax of our critically acclaimed, 152-chapter fan-novel An Eternity Of Mondays: Lasagna, Blood, And Guzzoline, the orange cartoon cat Garfield has apparently triumphed over warrior goddess of the wasteland Furiosa, sinking his soft, pasta-stained teeth into her battle-scarred neck. Per Variety, Chris Pratt’s iteration of the beloved Italian food consumer is set to triumph over a fittingly lazy box office weekend, where—in what we can only assume is a backhanded tribute to the Mad Max universe as a whole—desperate scavengers find themselves listlessly picking over the remains of better days.

To be clear, it’s not like The Garfield Movie, which sees Pratt star opposite Samuel L. Jackson in a story that finally addresses the paternal abandonment and attachment issues that have lurked for so long, and so obviously, in the large comedy feline’s ruined psyche, is set to do great at the box office, where it’s expected to bring in about $13 million in domestic markets over the weekend. But that’s still better than Furiosa, which it basically tied with over the Memorial Day weekend, and which now might not even be able to muster the oomph (at an estimated $10.8 million domestic) to beat out John Krasinski’s IF, which is currently in its third weekend in American theaters. (And this is also where we have to note the sad truth that, while Garfield, which cost about $60 million to make, and which will have a long tail thanks to a dearth of kids’ movies on the schedule at the moment, can weather that kind of economic shrug, the $160 million Furiosa probably can’t.)

All of which is a shame, in so far as Furiosa is great: Another deeply enjoyable expression of director George Miller’s central cinematic thesis that sometimes you just need to make a movie about fucked-up people in fucked-up cars doing awesome, fucked-up shit. We don’t understand the people who refuse to go see it any more than we understand the people who deride our own narrative masterpiece as “self-indulgent, and with not enough focus on what Odie’s up to this week.” But, tragically, these people do exist, and their money still spends—or, pointedly, doesn’t—at the box office.