As was widely expected, Pitch Perfect 2 beat Mad Max: Fury Road at the box office this weekend ($70 million to $44 million, based on early estimates). Meaning editors had all weekend to come up with their best singing pun. (Pitch Perfect Pitch Slaps, Pitch Perfect Outsings, Pitch Perfect Crescendos Past… really? Jesus that’s bad, get it together, LA Times.)
It’s a little disappointing, considering Fury Road is arguably the best action film of the last 10 years, and Pitch Perfect 2 is a movie you’d need a tranq dart and a windowless van to get me into, Anna Kendrick notwithstanding. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the first one fine, but that was about an a capella singing competition. The clips I’ve seen of the sequel just have a capella groups spontaneously sing-fighting in the street like West Side Story. Eh, no thanks. But clearly, it was some people’s cup of tea, and the $70 million domestic opening was more than double the $29 million budget and more than the first film’s entire domestic run ($65 million). It’s probably more of a comment on the original than on the sequel.
Meanwhile, no one’s crying about Fury Road‘s $44 million take (on a film that cost $150 million, and looked like it), which was reportedly right in line with expectations. Overseas, it beat Pitch Perfect, $65 million to $38.1 million, though it played in twice as many markets. MRA dorks excepted (the beauty of it is that boycotting Mad Max is its own punishment) the gender divide was alive and well as Mad Max played 70% male, Pitch Perfect played 75% female.
Avengers: Age of Ultron opened in China, grossing $156.3 million in six days. It has surpassed Furious 7 in domestic box office to become the highest-grossing of the year ($372 million). At $1.14 billion worldwide, it still has a ways to go to catch Furious 7’s $1.488 billion (at numbers four and eight all time, respectively).
The only real shocking news of the weekend is that while Pitch Perfect 2 earned an A- Cinemascore, Fury Road only managed a B+. How do you pay money for a Mad Max movie and leave thinking it didn’t totally deliver? It even scored a 98% RottenTomatoes rating. Anecdotally, I haven’t talked to a single person who saw it and thought it was anything less than spectacular. And you know what? I’d kind of like to keep it that way.
This week brings us Tomorrowland and a Poltergeist remake that’s opening on 3200+ screens despite the fact that I hadn’t thought about it all until five seconds ago. It will probably earn more than It Follows‘ entire run and I’ll still have to explain why I hate everyone.