In his latest video on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, YellowFlash announced the death of the Girl Boss movie trope. Hollywood is in for another wild ride as Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was a massive box office flop and the lowest Memorial Day box office sales in decades.
YellowFlash astutely observes the real problem that plagues Hollywood: “People don’t want to go to the theatres anymore they especially don’t want to go to the theatres for yet another 120 pound woman fighting off armies of men,” and when it comes to action movies, the audience is mainly male.
Although YellowFlash has not seen Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, he notes that people can tell from the trailer that is is going to be another woke movie with a super powerful woman doing crazy stuff and that is why they don’t want to go see it. He is of course correct, people are tired of the Girl Boss movie trope. More than that, where Hollywood could previously get away with a bait-and-switch like they did with Mad Max: Fury Road, where Mad Max was relegated to mere side character, people have wizened up and are not falling for it anymore.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga only made $59 million globally $33 million domestically, making it the lowest box office performance on a Memorial Day weekend in almost three decades. Considering that the production budget was $168 million, that is excluding the marketing costs, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is probably going to find it impossible to coming close to just break even.
Author and pop culture commentator Jon Del Arroz believes that Hollywood is barking up the wrong tree. He points out the latest excuse for example from Disney that there’s a superhero fatigue is wrong. He says that the reality is there’s strong female lead fatigue, where Hollywood has made “movie after movie after movie of replacing the protagonists in these movies with a strong female lead, who’s better than all the men out there, who’s such a badass and of course they make her more masculine than all the men.”
Jon Del Arroz showed an X post by Hollywood writer Chase Mitchel who posted “It’s time to accept that a large part of the movie public sucks shit,” when it appeared that Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes weren’t performing well either. This perfectly encapsulates Hollywood’s attitude, rather than looking inwards, they look around to see who or what they can blame, whether is be superhero fatigue or bad audiences.
YellowFlash may right, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga did herald the end of the Girl Boss. It will be a slow death however as there are probably a slew of Girl Boss movies already in production or close to it which hasn’t hit the screens yet. It will be the end of theatres.
Let us know in comments whether you believe that YellowFlash is right and whether theatres will survive Hollywood’s Girl Boss movies.
I have been disagreeing for some time about the whole ‘superhero fatigue’ thing. I mean, people have been craving the stories of superpowered champions since Beowulf. From a literature point of view, litRPG (where people can become superpowered through a game-like ‘system’) has been absolutely exploding in popularity, as have first-person portal fantasies, and even bluntly superhero-themed stories.
Even a review from a site whose purpose is to pick out all the woke elements in movies (and he’s highly tuned to them
as it’s the purpose of his site ) gave this movie a high based rating and mentioned nearly no woke moments in the movie.
Flash and many like him are making assumptions.
Also does George Miller have a history of adding woke nonsense into his films ?
However this movie doesn’t look good based on trailers and is a sequel to a character I guess many don’t care about
In a year full of remakes and sequels that all mostly look like bad movies..
That’s the real issue .