VIDEO: The Critical Drinker On Furiosa And Its Weak Box Office Performance This Weekend

The Critical Drinker says Furiosa is a little bit better than meh.

And he says the key question around the movie is “why.”

Which was my reaction. I didn’t really see Furiosa as a character which needed a spinoff from the Mad Max series.

And I haven’t seen it, though I’ll probably watch it when it goes to streaming. But it’s bombing for two reasons.

1. Nobody wants to watch another action movie with a female lead. Those aren’t believable, and men – who are the primary audience for action movies – are REALLY sick and tired of having Hollywood lecture them about how women can fight like men, blah blah blah.

Which, incidentally, might actually be too bad in this case, because according to the Drinker, Anya Taylor-Joy actually turns in a solid performance as Furiosa. She’s definitely an excellent actress, though she – of course – had to spout a bunch of feminist propaganda to the trade press in the runup to the movie’s release last week. That probably didn’t help to smooth over the audiences’ exhaustion with the girlboss trope.

But also…

2. You can’t do a Mad Max movie without Mad Max. Without Mad Max, all you have is a non-contextual, bleak, post-apocalyptic film with lots of CGI and no real story to tell that anybody cares. Which is the Drinker’s point.

There are so many good stories out there Hollywood could tell, and so many new franchises just waiting to break out and remedy the film industry’s self-induced death-spiral. The real question is whether anyone in the industry is willing to take a chance on those, or are they going to continue attempting to breathe life into 20th-century franchises which have already reached their terminal velocities.