The Garfield Movie Takes The Top Spot At The Weekend Box Office During Another Super Slow Week

Last week's box office results were dismal. Hollywood launched two new wide releases for the Memorial Day holiday hoping to appeal to audiences of all ages, but both George Miller's Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Mark Dindal's The Garfield Movie ended up seriously underperforming. This turn of events resulted in a great deal of tsuris across the industry as concern has increased about the 2024 summer movie season as a whole... and circumstances most definitely didn't get better over the last three days.

With no new wide releases arriving on the big screen this past Friday, the Top 10 for this weekend is dominated by May leftovers, and the results aren't pretty. Check out the chart below and join me after for analysis.

The Garfield Movie Takes Over The #1 Spot From Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

With Hollywood's major studios opting not to release any fresh features on 2,000+ screens, both The Garfield Movie and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga were given the opportunity to try and grow some legs and save themselves from reputations as flops this weekend. The results ended up being mixed: the animated family film based on the classic comic strip managed to have a good weekend-to-weekend numbers and now has earned the designation of being the "#1 Movie In America," but the Australian action film failed to generate any word-of-mouth success after earning the box office crown in its debut.

According to The Numbers, The Garfield Movie followed its $24 million premiere last weekend by adding $14 million to its domestic gross in the last three days. While those aren't results that one typically wants to see during the summer blockbuster season, that calculates to a 42 percent drop, which is pretty much the best result that the film could have hoped for. While critics weren't kind to the feature, with many bashing it for its lazy and generic story, movie-goers have been more friendly. In addition to it sporting an 81 percent Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes (contrasting with the 36 percent approval from professionals), CinemaScore surveys returned a "B+" grade.

Filmmakers and executives at Sony are likely now keeping fingers crossed that The Garfield Movie can ultimately experience success similar to what happened with Peter Sohn's Elemental last summer. When the Pixar movie arrived in theaters last June, it too made less than $30 million in its first three days and looked like it was going to be a flop. Instead, it hung around in the Top 10 for a month and a half with tiny weekend-to-weekend drops, and by the time it was done playing on the big screen in the United States and Canada, it made $154.4 million to pair with the $330.4 million that it grossed overseas. By the end of 2023, it ranked as the seventeenth biggest release of the year domestically.

Funnily enough, the biggest obstacle The Garfield Movie will have to overcome in order to pull off such a run will be Pixar's newest release, which is set to arrive in a couple of weeks. Kelsey Mann's Inside Out 2 is expected to be one of the biggest films of the summer, and it is going to be targeting the attention of the exact same demographic that is currently digging Chris Pratt's turn as the world's most famous lazy, Monday-hating orange cat. When kids turn their attention to the emotion-centric Pixar sequel, box office numbers may fall hard.

Unfortunately, there aren't really any similar silver linings or opportunities for optimism in the discussion of Furiosa. While George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road is a beloved film that made $153.6 million when it played in theaters back in 2015, the new prequel is having a tough time earning similar levels of hype – which is a tough pill to swallow given that it has the same CinemaScore grade as The Garfield Movie and has earned raves from critics.

After making just $26.3 million in its first three days in theaters, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga made just $10.8 million in its sophomore weekend – which is a rough 59 percent dip. The film has made $49.7 million domestically thus far, and combined with what it has made overseas, it has made $82.2 million worldwide. Considering that the movie was made with a $168 million budget (per Deadline), it's not presently  sitting in a great place financially.

Given the reception of the film, one can predict that it is going to ultimately have a strong legacy as people eventually get around to watching it when it hits the home video market... but that's obviously not ideal. Furiosa is a film that is made to watch on the biggest screen you can find so that you can completely immerse yourself in the world, and it's a shame that more people aren't appreciating that fact presently.

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes Crosses $300 Million Worldwide

To close things out on a more positive note, I'll highlight a milestone crossing for what has been the most successful tentpole release in the summer of 2024 thus far.  In its fourth weekend of release, Wes Ball's Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes is still hanging around in the Top 5, and it added $8.8 million to its home tickets sales over the last three days. That brings its domestic gross to $140 million, and when combined with what the film has made in foreign territories, that means that it has now made over $300 million ($310.9 million, to be more precise).

It's unclear if the title will ultimately be able to earn more than the films in the Caesar Trilogy starring Andy Serkis (the lowest grossing title among them was Rupert Wyatt's Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, which brought in $471 million in 2011), but the numbers suggest that the Planet Of The Apes franchise is still going very strong as it launches its new era. Unfortunately, we're still waiting on news about a sequel.

Looking ahead, there is hope that the box office will get a nice boost this weekend thanks to the star power of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's Bad Boys: Ride Or Die is arriving everywhere this Friday, and I'll be back next Sunday here on CinemaBlend to report on its performance. In the meantime, you can take a look at all of the titles that are set to come out in the months ahead with our 2024 Movie Release Calendar.