Weekend Box Office: Everything’s coming up Furious

Despite being one of the less spirited entries in the series, The Fate Of The Furious set the record for its largest international opening by grossing an estimated $532.5 million this weekend, including a massive $100.2 million in the United States and a mind-boggling $190 million in China. Those are big numbers. In fact, they are cartoonishly huge, as befits the scale of a franchise that has abandoned both its drag racing origins and its later caper shenanigans for plots more reminiscent of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan-era James Bond. (At least the Moore movies had those sweet John Barry scores.)

The Fate Of The Furious’ $100.2 million opening—which accounted for almost two-thirds of the weekend’s reported American box office—dwarfed all comers. The few to survive this decimation were the already successful The Boss Baby (No. 2, $15.5 million) and Beauty And The Beast (No. 3, $13.6 million). Along with Jordan Peele’s Get Out—which rose up a spot this weekend to to No. 7 with $2.9 million, bringing its domestic total up to $167.5 million against a teensy-weensy budget—these represented the few real successes of a season otherwise piled with domestic flops.

Landing at No. 4 with $6.5 million, Smurfs: The Lost Village at least has a fairly sizable international box office to help recoup its reported $60 million production budget. The same might be true of the under-performing Power Rangers (No. 8, $2.8 million), which has made $80 million in the United States against a reported budget of $100 million, but has yet to open in China, and Kong: Skull Island (No. 10, $2.7 million), which has totaled $161.2 million here against a reported budget of $185 million, but has done swimmingly overseas. The rule of thumb with Hollywood movies is that they have to make more than twice their budget to earn a profit, though the reported figures never include the gargantuan sums of money spent on advertising. (For a rough estimate of the advertising budget, rate how sick you are of ads for the film on a scale of 1 to 10 and then multiply that number by $15 million.)

However, Ghost In The Shell, which plummeted to the No. 11 slot with $2.4 million in only its third week of release, is a bona fide flop. To add insult to injury, it was muscled out of the Top 10 by the likes of Going In Style (No. 5, $6.4 million), Gifted (No. 6, $3 million), and The Case For Christ (No. 9, $2.7 million). Tommy’s Honor, which opened at No. 20, earned only $218,920, despite opening in 167 theaters, and the even less enticing Spark: A Space Tail plopped into No. 24, with an estimated $112,352 earned in a whopping 365 theaters, giving it a miserable per theater average of $308.

But all is not lost! Opening in very limited release, James Gray’s The Lost City Of Z—the recipient of our rare and coveted A grade—came in with the weekend’s highest per-theater average, earning $28,158 on each screen. (Both of The A.V. Club’s staff film critics agree that’s a great movie, even if they can’t agree on how great of a movie it is.) Also successful on the indie front was Norman, which made an average of $20,733 on five screens. Both films will be expanding to more theaters over the coming weeks.