Furiosa is fighting Garfield for one of the worst Memorial Day box offices in decades

It’s a hard old world out there, so we hope you can take comfort in a mental image that’s gotten us through the occasional cold and rainy morning of late: Imperator Furiosa, battle queen of the wastes, duking it out with obese lasagna cat Garfield in a battle for the death. Oh, how the fur will fly; oh, how the Mondays will be mourned.

Certainly, that hypothetical grudge match is more amusing than what’s actually happening at the box office this Memorial Day weekend, as our two champions’ respective films—George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Chris Pratt’s The Garfield Movie—listlessly duke it out for the honor of winning the worst such holiday weekend in roughly four decades.

Indeed, Memorial Day looks all set to continue 2024's sleepy trend at the box office, with Furiosa, despite a lot of hype from the Fury Road fans of the world, reportedly set to bring in between $31 and $33 million this weekend. That’ll put it just ahead of Garfield, which is also aiming at the $31 million mark—but still on track to be the worst Memorial Day opener in (per Deadline) 41 years. (Just barely beating Return Of The Jedi, which got off to a slow domestic start back in 1983.) That includes opening significantly worse than Fury Road, which hit theaters a week before Memorial Day in 2015 to the tune of $45.4 million (and still got its butt kicked by the far more successful Pitch Perfect 2.)

As far as we can tell, the wider world just doesn’t care about seeing incredibly sick shit happening in cars the way us normal people do, damning Furiosa—which has gotten strong reviews, if not the exultant tributes Fury Road received—with a lack of “four-quadrant appeal.” (I.e., boring people don’t want to see it.) The movie was already projected to bring in a very low $40 million this weekend, but is now expected to fall even short of those. That’s rough for a movie that cost $168 million to get all that gorgeous automotive mayhem on the screen; Garfield, which only cost ~$60 million to make, will end up the far more profitable of the two films, no matter who ends up winning the weekend.